LIBRARY OF GONGRESS. 

*^li2,p. Copyright No, 

She]f..I?R.<i«b3 

UNITED STATES OF AME^iIa. 



IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF 
CHARLES LAMB 




CHARLES LAMB. 



u^ 



n^ 



IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF 
CHARLES LAMB 



BY 

Benjamin Ellis Martin 

AUTHOR OF "old CHELSEA," ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED BY HERBERT RAILTON 
AND JOHN FULLEYLOVE 



WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY E. D. NORTH 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1890 






>c%:a>c> ^ 






Copyright, 1890, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



/^'d^rrs 



Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York. 



TO 

L. H. F, 



During the half-century since the death of Charles 
Lamb, an immense mass of matter has been gathered 
about him and about his writings. In burrowing 
among the treasures and the rubbish of this mound, I 
have been struck by the total absence of what may be 
called a topographical biography of the fnan, or of any 
accurate record of his rovings : with the exception of 
that necessarily brief one corJained in Mr. Laurence 
Huttons invaluable " Literary Landmarks of Lon- 
don." Such a. shortcomi7ig is the more marked, inas- 
much as Lamb is so closely identified with the Town. 
Not one among the men of letters, whose shadows walk 
the London streets with us, knew them better, or loved 
them more, than he did. In following his footsteps, 
I have found still untoitched many of the houses that 
harboured him ; and I have taken delight in the task, 
before the restless hand of reconstruction shall have 
plucked them forever away, of helping to keep alive the 
look of all that is left of the walls within which he 
lived and laboured. 

From this mere memento of brie k-and-7?ior tar — all 
my original intent — / have been led on to a study of 



the man himself^ from our more modern and more 
humane point of view. The time has long gone by for 
that kindly compact of reticence which may have been 
becoming in the years directly after his death. Nothing 
need be hidden now about the madness of Mary, about 
the terrible taking-off of her mother, about the early 
insanity of Charles himself, or his later weaknesses. 
And, in telling the entire truth, I have found comfort 
and cheer in the belief that neither apology nor homily 
can ever again be deemed needful to a decorous de- 
meanour beside these dead. 

So that I have sketched him just as he lives for me — 
the lines and the wrinkles of his aspect, the shine and 
the shadow of his soul : just as he moved in the crowd, 
among his friends, by his sister s side, and alone. To 
show exactly what he was, rather than what he did, I 
have used his own words wherever this was possible ; 
altering them as to their letter alone, where it has 
seemed essential. In this spirit of affectionate allegiance 
I have followed him faithfully in all his wanderings, 
from his crhdle close by the Thames to his grave not 

far from the Lea. 

B. E. M. 

New York, October, 1890. 



List of Illustrations. 

Charles Lamb, .... frontispiece 

PAGE 

The Temple Gardens^ from Croivn Office Row, 14 
By John Fulleylove. 

A Corner in the Blue- Coat School, . , .18 
By Hej'bei't Railton. 

The East hidia House, . , . . .26 

By Herbert Railton. 

No. 7 Little Queen Street, . . . .32 

The House in Pentonville, . . . '39 

The Feathers Tavern, ..... 48 
By Herbert Railton. 

No. 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden, . . 78 
By Herbert Railto7i. 

The Cottage in Colebrook Row, . . .96 

By Herbert Railton. 



List of Illustrations. 

PAGE 

Lamb's two Houses at Enfield^ . . = 102 

By John Fulleylove. 

No. 34 Southampton Buildings^ . . .122 

By Herbert Railton. 

Charles Lamb — the Maclise Portrait^ . . 126 

Facsimile of a- Receipt for a Legacy ^ . . 128 

Signed by Charles Lamb as Guardian for 
his Sister Mary. 

The Walden House at Edmonton^ . . .130 
By John Fulleylove. 

Edmonton Churchy from Lamb' s Grave, . . 136 
By John Fulleylove. 

The Grave of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb at 

Edmonton., . . . . . .140 

By John Fulleylove. 




Mhe 



W I^^^^i^ / 




*' The sun set ; but set not his hope : 
Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up : 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye : 
And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time. 
He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the Age of Gold again : 
His action won such reverence sweet, 
As hid all measure of the feat." 

— Emerson. 



" Far from me, and from my friends, be such 
frigid philosophy as may conduct us, indifferent 
and unmoved, over any ground, which has been 
dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue." 

— Samuel Johnson. 



I. 








p- U C H fs the legend 
that catches one's eye, 



plain for all men to 
see, on many a hoard- 
ing in London streets. Be- 
hind those boards, wide or 
high, on which the callous contractor shame- 
lessly blazons his dreadful trade — '' Old Houses 
Bought to be Pulled Down " — he is stupidly 
pickaxing to pieces historic bricks and mortar 
which ought to be preserved priceless and im- 
perishable. Within only a few years, I have had 
to look on, while thus were broken to bits and 
carted away to chaos John Dryden's dwelling- 
place in Fetter Lane, Benjamin Franklin's and 
Washington Irving's lodgings in Little Britain, 
Byron's birthplace in Hollis Street, Milton's 
*' pretty garden-house," in Petty France, West- 



4 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 

minster. The spacious fireplace by which the 
poet sat, during his fast-darkening days — for 
in this house he lost his first wife and his eye- 
sight — was knocked down, as only one among 
other numbered lots, to stolid builders. And 
the stone, *' Sacred to Milton, the Prince of 
Poets" — placed in the wall facing the garden, 
by William Hazlitt, living here early in our 
century, beneath which Jeremy Bentham, occu- 
pant of the adjoining house, was wont to make 
his guests fall on their knees — this stone has 
gone to " patch a wall to expel the winter's 
flaw." 

To this house there used to come, to call on 
Hazlitt, a man of noticeable and impressive 
presence : — small of stature, fragile of frame, 
clad in clothing of tightly fitting black, which 
was clerical as to cut and well-worn as to tex- 
ture ; his " almost immaterial legs," in Tom 
Hood's phrase, ending in gaiters and straps; 
his dark hair, not quite black, curling crisply 
aboOt a noble head and brow — ** a head 
worthy of Aristotle," Leigh Hunt tells us; 
" full of dumb eloquence," are Hazlitt's words; 
*' such only may be seen in the finer portraits 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 5 



of Titian," John Forster puts it ; "a long, 
melancholy face, with keen penetrating eyes," 
we learn from Barry Cornwall ; brown eyes, 
kindly, quick, observant ; his dark complexion 
and grave expression brightened by the fre- 
quent " sweet smile, with a touch of sadness 
m It. 

This visitor, of such peculiar and piquant 
personality — externally " a rare composition of 
the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel," to use 
his own words of the singer Braham — is Charles 
Lamb, a clerk in the East India House, living 
with his sister Mary in chambers in the Inner 
Temple. Let us walk with him as he returns to 
those peaceful precincts, still of signal interest, 
despite the ruin wrought by recent improve- 
ments. Here, as in the day of Spenser, " stu- 
dious lawyers have their bowers," and " have 
thriven ; " here, on every hand, we see the 
shades of Evelyn, Congreve, Cowper, the 
younger Colman, Fielding, Goldsmith, John- 
son, Boswell ; here, above all, the atmosphere 
is still redolent with sweet memories of the 
** best beloved of English writers," as Algernon 
Swinburne well calls Charles Lamb. Closer 



6 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



and more compact than elsewhere are his foot- 
prints in these Temple grounds ; for he was 
born within their gates, his youthful world was 
bounded by their walls, his happiest years, as 
boy and as man, were passed in their buildings. 
And out beyond these borders we shall track 
his steps mainly through adjacent streets, al- 
most always along the City's streets, of which 
he was as fond as Samuel Johnson or Charles 
Dickens. He loved, all through life, " enchant- 
ing London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented 
alley, and her lowest -bowing tradesman, I would 
not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn 
O ! her lamps of a night ! her rich goldsmiths, 
print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware men, 
pastry-cooks, St. Paul's Churchyard, the Strand, 
Exeter 'Change, Charing Cross, with the man 
upon a black horse ! These are thy gods, O 
London!" He couldn't care, he said, for the 
beauties of nature, as they have been confinedly 
called ; and used to persist, with his pleasing 
perversity, that when he climbed Skiddaw he 
was thinking of the ham-and-beef shop in St. 
Martin's Lane ! "Have I not enough without 
your mountains?" he wrote to Wordsworth. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 7 

" I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I 
not know that the mind will make friends with 
anything " — even with scenery ! It was a serious 
step which Lamb took in later life, out from his 
beloved streets into the country ; a step which 
certainly saddened, and doubtless shortened, the 
last stage of his earthly journey. 

By a happy chance — for they have an unhal- 
lowed habit in London town of destroying just 
those buildings which I should select to save, 
leaving unmolested those that would not be 
missed, for all they ever have to say to us — 
nearly every one of Lamb's successive homes 
has been rescued from ruin, and kept inviolate 
for our reverent regard. " Cheerful Crown 
Office Row (place of my kindly engendure) " — 
to use his own words — has been only partly 
rebuilt ; and that end of the block wherein lived 
his parents stands almost in the same state as 
when it was erected in 1737 ; this date told to 
us to-day by the old-fashioned figures cut on 
its easterly end. It was then named '' The New 
Building, opposite the Garden-Wall," and under 
that division of the Chamber-Book of the Inner 
Temple I have hunted up its numerous occu- 



8 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



pants. By this archive, and by the Books of 
Accounts for the eighteenth century, I have 
thus been enabled to trace Samuel Salt from 
his first residence within the Temple in 1746, in 
Rani Alley Building — now gone — through suc- 
cessive removals, until he settled down in his 
last chambers, wherein he died in February, 
1793. The record reads — a "parliament" 
meaning one of the fixed meetings in each term 
of the Benchers of the Temple, for the purpose 
of transacting business, and of calling students 
to the bar — " 13th May, 1768. At this Parlia- 
ment : It is ordered that Samuel Salt, Esquire, 
a Barrister of this Society, aged about Fifty, be 
and is hereby admitted, for his own life, to the 
benefit of an Assignment in and to All that 
Ground Chamber, No. 2, opposite the Garden 
Walk in Crown Office Row: He, the said 
Samuel Salt having paid for the Purchase 
thereof into the Treasury of this Society, the 
sum of One Hundred and Fifty pounds." 

So that it was in No. 2 — the numbers having 
remained always unchanged — of Crown Office 
Row, in one of the rear rooms of the ground 
floor, which then looked out on Inner Temple 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 9 

Lane, some of which rooms have been swept 
away since, and others have been sHghtly al- 
tered, that Charles Lamb was born, on the loth 
February, 1775. 

For Samuel Salt, Esquire — one of ** The Old 
Benchers of the Inner Temple," whose pensive 
gentility is portrayed in Elia's essay of that 
title — had in his employ, as *' his clerk, his good 
servant, his dresser, his friend, his * flapper,' his 
guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer," one John 
Lamb; who formed, with his wife and children, 
the greater part of the household. Of him, too, 
under the well-chosen name of Lovel, we have 
the portrait, vivid and rounded, in his son's 
paper. " He was a man of an incorrigible and 
losing honesty. A good fellow withal and 
'would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed 
he never considered inequalities, or calculated 
the number of his opponents. . . . Lovel was 
the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face 
as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly 
to resemble (I have a portrait of him which 
confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humor- 
ous poetry — next to Swift and Prior — moulded 
heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, 



10 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



by the dint of natural genius merely ; turned 
cribbage-boards and such small cabinet toys, to 
perfection ; took a hand at quadrille or bowls 
with equal facility ; made punch better than 
any man of his degree in England ; had the 
merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether 
as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you 
could desire. He was a brother of the angle, 
moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest 
companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have 
chosen to go a-fishing with." In truth, 

" A merry cheerful man. A merrier man, 
A man more apt to frame matter for mirth, 
Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve, 
Making life social, and the laggard time 
To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer 
The little circle of domestic friends." 

This John Lamb was devoted to the welfare 
of his master, Samuel Salt ; who, in turn, did 
nothing without consulting him, or failed in 
anything without expecting and fearing his ad- 
monishing. " He put himself almost too much 
in his hands, had they not been the purest in 
the world." To him and to his children Salt 
was a life-long benefactor, and never, until death 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 1 1 



had made an end to the good man's good 
deeds, did there fall on the family any shadow 
of change or trouble or penury. 

It was in Salt's chambers that Charles and 
his sister Mary, in their youthful years, "tum- 
bled into a spacious closet of good old English 
reading, and browsed at will on that fair and 
wholesome pasturage : " thus already so early 
drawn together by kindred tastes and studies, 
even as they were already at one in their joint 
heritage of the father's latent mental malady. 
They had learned their letters, and picked up 
crumbs of rudimentary knowledge, at a small 
school in Fetter Lane, hard by the Temple ; 
the boys being taught in the mornings, the girls 
in the afternoons. It stood on the edge of " a 
discoloured, dingy garden in the passage lead- 
ing into Fetter Lane from Bartlett's buildings. 
This was near to Holborn." Bartlett's name is 
still kept alive in Bartlett's Passage, right there ; 
but no stone of his building now stands; and 
the only growth of any garden in that turbu- 
lent thoroughfare to-day is pavement and mud 
and obscene urchins. 

The inscription painted over their school- 



12 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



door asserted that it was kept by " Mr. Will- 
iam Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Lan- 
guages." '' Heaven knows what languages were 
taught in it, then! I am sure that neither my 
sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a 
little of our native English " — so Charles wrote 
nearly fifty years after to William Hone, the 
editor of the Every Day Book. In its pages 
had just appeared a woful narrative of the 
poverty and desolation of one Starkey, who 
had been "a gentle usher" in that school. In 
the letter written by Lamb as a pendant to 
that paper, he gossips characteristically about 
the memories of those school-days thus awak- 
ened in him and in his sister. He vividly 
portrays that down-trodden and downcast 
usher, who '' was not always the abject thing 
he came to ; " and who actually had bold and 
figurative words for the big girls, when they 
talked together, or teased him during his recita- 
tions. " Oh, how I remember our legs wedged 
into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where . 
we sat elbowing each other ; and the injunc- 
tions to attain a free hand, unattainable in 
that position !" 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 13 



They had, also, an aged school-dame here, 
who was proud to prattle to her pupils about 
her aforetime friend, Oliver Goldsmith ; tell- 
ing them how the good-natured man, then too 
poor to present her with a copy of his " De- 
serted Village," had lent it to her to read. 
He had become famous now, and so afflu- 
ent — by the success of ''The Good Natur'd 
Man," indeed ! — that he had bought chambers 
on the second floor of No. 2 Brick Court, 
Middle Temple. This was but a biscuit toss 
from Crown Office Row, and perchance little 
Mary Lamb sometimes met, within the 
grounds, the short, stout, plain, pock-marked 
Irish doctor. He died in those chambers, 
only ten months before the birth of Charles ; 
and was buried somewhere in the burying- 
ground of the Temple church. Within it, the 
Benchers put up a tablet to his memory. It is 
now in their vestry, wherein you shall also find 
the baptismal records of nearly all the Lamb 
children. The inscription on the tablet may 
have been first spelled out by Mary to her 
small and eager brother. Doubtless the two 
children knew the exact spot of his grave — 



14 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



known exactly to none of us to-day — even as 
they knew every corner and cranny of the 
Temple grounds and buildings. They played 
in its gardens, and looked down on them from 
these same upper windows of No. 2 Crown 
Office Row, which have been selected by Mr. 
FuUeylove for his point of view. Then these 
gardens were as Shakespeare saw them, when 
he, by a blameless anachronism, caused to be 
enacted in them the famous scene of the 
Roses ; really rehearsed there, years before, 
when Warwick assigned the rose to Planta- 
genet. Now, the grounds have been extended 
riverwards by the construction of the Embank- 
ment ; and the ancient historic blocks of build- 
ings about them have been vulgarized into 
something new and fine. 

Mary and Charles were always together 
during these early days. Of the seven children 
born into the family, only three escaped death 
in infancy : our two, and their brother John, 
elder by two years than Mary. Their mother 
loved them all, but most of all did she love 
** dear, little, selfish, craving John ; " who, as 
was well written by Charles in later life, was 







THE TEMPLE GARDENS, FROM CROWN OFFICE ROW. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 15 



not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which 
Mary had a right to claim. But the mother, 
like the father, was fond of fun, and found her 
favourite in her handsome, sportive, noisy boy ; 
showing scant sympathy with and no insight 
into the " moythered brains " — her own phrase 
— -of her sensitive, brooding daughter, who 
already gave unheeded evidence of the con- 
genital gloom by which her mind was to 
become so clouded. Another member of the 
small household was the father's queer old- 
maiden sister, Aunt Hetty, who passed her 
days sitting silently or mumbling mysteriously 
as she peered over her spectacles at the two 
children, huddled together in their youthful 
fear of her. 

So it came to pass that Mary took charge of 
the ^' weakly but very pretty babe " — as she re- 
called him, long years after, when he lay dead 
at Edmonton, and she, in the next room, was 
rambling disjointedly on about all their past. 
With a childish wisdom, born, surely, not of 
her years, but rather of her loneliness and her 
unrequited caresses and her craving for com- 
panionship, she became at once his big sister, 



i6 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



his Httle mother, his guardian angel. She cared 

for him in his helpless babyhood, she gave 

strength to his feeble frame, she nurtured 

his growing brain, she taught him to talk and 

to walk. We seem to see the tripping of his 

feet, that 

" half linger, 

Half run before," 

trying to keep pace with her steps then ; even 
as they always all through life tried to do, 
wheresoever she walked, until they stopped at 
the edge of his grave. The story of these two 
lives of double singleness, from these childish 
footprints to that grave, is simply the story of 
their love. He, like his own Child-Angel, was 
to know weakness and reliance and the shadow 
of human imbecility ; and he was to go with a 
lame gait ; but^ in his goings^ he " exceeded all 
mortal children in grace and swiftness T And 
so pity springs up in us, as in angelic bosoms ; 
and yearnings touch us, too, at the memory of 
this ''immortal lame one." 

The boy's next school, to which he obtained a 
presentation through the influence of Mr. Salt, 
is known officially as Christ's Hospital, and is 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 17 



commonly called the Blue-Coat School. It still 
stands, a stately monument of the munificence 
of " that godly and royal child, King Edward 
VI., the flower of the Tudor name — the young 
flower that was untimely cropped, as it began 
to fill our land with its early odours — the boy- 
patron of boys — the serious and holy child, 
who walked with Cranmer and Ridley." To- 
day, as we stay our steps in Newgate Street, 
and peer through the iron railings at the dingy 
red brick and stone facings of the ancient walls ; 
or, as we pa-use under the tiny statue of the 
boy-king — founder, only ten days before his 
death, of this noble hospital for poor fatherless 
children and foundlings — we may look at the 
out-of-school games going on in the great quad- 
rangle : the foolish flapping skirts of the strip- 
lings tucked into their red leathern waistbands 
to give fair and free play to their lanky yellow 
legs, their uncapped heads taking sun or shower 
with equal unconcern. 

Among them, unseen of them, seem to move 
the forms of those other boys, Charles Lamb, 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt — 
all students here about this time. Our boy 



i8 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



was then a little past seven, a gentle, affec- 
tionate lad, " terribly shy," as he said of him- 
self later, and made all the more sensitive 
by his slight stammer, which lapsed to a stut- 
ter when his nerves were wrought upon and 
startled. Yet he was no more left alone and 
isolated now than he was in after life ; his 
schoolfellows indulged him, the masters were 
fond of him, and he was given special privileges 
not known to the others. His little complaints 
were listened to ; he had tea and a hot roll o' 
mornings ; his ancient aunt used to toddle 
there to bring him good things, when he, 
schoolboy-like, only despised her for it, and, as 
he confessed when older, used to be ashamed to 
see her come and sit herself down on the old 
coal-hole steps near where they went into the 
grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring 
out her basin, with some nice thing she had 
caused to be saved for him. And he was 
allowed to go home to the Temple for short 
visits, from time to time, so passing his young 
days between '' cloister and cloister." 

As he walks down the Old Bailey, or through 
Fleet Market — then in the full foul odour of 

















A CORNER IN THE BI.UE-COAT SCHOOL. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 19 



its wickedness and nastiness — and so up Fleet 
Street on his way home, we may be sure that 
his eager eye alights on all that is worth its 
while, and that the young alchemist is already 
putting into practice that process by which he 
transmuted the mud of street and pavement 
into pure gold, and so found all that was always 
precious to him in their stones. After treading 
them for many years, as boy and as man, he 
asks : *' Is any night-walk comparable to a walk 
from St. Paul's to Charing Cross for lighting 
and paving, for crow^ds going and coming with- 
out respite, the rattle of coaches, and the cheer- 
fulness of shops ? " 

Among his schoolfellows, Charles formed 
special friendships with a few select spirits ; 
and in Coleridge — " the inspired charity-boy," 
who entered the school at the same time, 
though three years older — he found a life-long 
companion. He looked up to the elder lad — 
dreamy, dejected, lonely — with an affection and 
a reverence which never failed all through life, 
though in after years subject to the strain 
of Coleridge's alienation, absence, and silence. 
" Bless you, old sophist," he wrote once to Cole- 



20 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



ridge, " who, next to human nature taught me 
all the corruption I was capable of knowing." 

The two lads — along with Middleton, then a 
Grecian in the school, afterward Bishop of Cal- 
cutta — figure together in the fine group in sil- 
ver which passes from ward to ward each year, 
according to merit in studies and in conduct. 
There is a Charles Lamb prize, too, given every 
year, as fittingly should be, to the best English 
essayist among the Blue-Coat boys, consisting 
of a silver medal : on one side a laurel wreath 
enwrapped about the hospital's arms ; on the 
reverse, Lamb's profile, his hair something too 
curly, his aspect somewhat smug. It would be 
a solace to his kindly spirit could he know that 
his memory is thus kept green in the school 
which he left with sorrow, and to which he al- 
ways looked back fondly. When a man, he 
used to go to see the boys; and Leigh Hunt — 
who entered a little later — has left us a pleas- 
ant picture of one of these visits. Charles had 
been a good student in the musty classical 
course of the school; not fonder of his hexa- 
meters than of his hockey, however ; and when 
he left, in November, 1789, aged nearly fifteen, 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 21 



he had become a deputy Grecian, he was a 
capital Latin scholar, he probably had a firm 
conviction that there was a language called 
Greek, and he had read widely and well in the 
English classics. Doubtless he was, even then, 
already familiar with the Elizabethan drama- 
tists, his life-long ** midnight darlings ; " above 
all, he had nurtured himself upon the plays of 
Shakespeare, which were " the strongest and 
sweetest food of his mind from infancy." 

The somewhat sombre surroundings of his 
summer holidays, too, helped to form_ him into 
an " old-fashioned child." The earliest thing he 
could remember, he once wrote, was Mackery 
End ; or Mackarel End, as it is spelled, perhaps 
more properly, in some old maps of Hertford- 
shire. He could just recall his visit there, un- 
der the care of "Bridget Elia" — as he named 
his sister in his essays. This youthful visit had 
been made to a farmer, one Gladman, who had 
married their grandmother's sister ; and his 
farm-house was delightfully situated within a 
gentle walk from Wheathampstead. Charles 
describes his return thither with Mary, more 
than forty years after ; and how, spite of their 



22 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



trepidation as to the greeting they might get, 
they were joyfully received by a radiant woman- 
cousin, " who might have sat to a sculptor for 
the image of Welcome." 

Mainly, however, were the boy's holidays 
passed with his grandmother Field, the old 
and trusted housekeeper of the Plumer fam- 
ily at Blakesware, in Hertfordshire: an ancient 
mansion, topped by many turrets, gables, 
carved chimneys, guarded all about by a 
solid red-brick wall and heavy iron gates. 
He was not allowed to go outside the 
grounds, and was content to wander over their 
trimly-kept terraces and about the tranquil 
park, wherein aged trees bent themselves in 
grotesque shapes. Beyond, he fancied that a 
dark lake stretched silently, striking terror to 
the lad's imagination. 

" So strange a passion for the place pos- 
sessed me in those years, that, though there 
lay — I shame to say how few roods distant from 
the mansion — half hid by trees, what I judged 
some romantic lake, such was the spell which 
bound me to the house, and such my careful- 
ness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 2} 



that the idle waters lay unexplored for me ; 
and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing 
over elder devotion, I found, to my astonish- 
ment, a pretty brawling brook had been the 
Lacus Incognitus of my infancy." It was the 
placid tiny Ashe, which, curving about through 
this valley, here brawls over one of the wears 
that have given the place its name, and his 
lake proved to be only one of its little inlets. 

Within doors he would wander through the 
wainscoted halls and the tapestried bedrooms 
— " tapestry so much i)etter than painting, not 
adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots 
. . . all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider 
than his descriptions. Actaeon in mid sprout, 
with the unappeasable prudery of Diana ; and 
the still more provoking, and almost culinary, 
coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately 
divesting of Marsyas." He would gaze long in 
wonder on the busts of the Twelve Caesars 
ranged around the marble hall, and would 
study the prints of Hogarth's Progress of the 
Rake and of the Harlot hung on the walls. 
'* Why, every plank and panel of that house for 
me had magic in it," he says in the essay on 



24 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



*' Blakesmoor in H shire;" under which 

name he disguises the place. That is a delight- 
ful paper, ending with this most musical pas- 
sage : '^ Mine too — whose else ? — thy costly fruit- 
garden, with its sun-baked southern wall ; the 
ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from 
the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots 
now of palest lead, save that a speck here and 
there, saved from the elements, bespake their 
pristine state to have been gilt and glittering ; 
the verdant quarters backwarder still ; and, 
stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy 
firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and 
the day-long murmuring wood-pidgeon, with 
that antique image in the centre, God or 
Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old 
Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or 
to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to 
that fragmental mystery." 

Lamb went back in 1822 to revisit these 
boyhood scenes, only to find that ruin had 
been done with a swift hand, and that brick- 
and-mortar knaves had plucked every panel 
and spared no plank. The ancient mansion 
entirely disappeared during that year, and a 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 25 



new Blakesware House soon after rose on its 
site: "worthy in picturesque architecture and 
fair proportions of its old namesake," in the 
words of Canon Ainger. 

The boy used to go to church of a Sunday 
with his grandmother, to Widford ; nearer to 
their place than their own parish church at 
Ware. On a stone under the noble elms many 
a transatlantic visitor has read the simple in- 
scription, "Mary Field, August 5th, 1792." 
Beneath it lies the grandmother. 



II. 



Until lately, in the year 1889, when the 
frenzy for Improvement and the rage for Rent 
wiped it out, I could have shown you a queer bit 
of cobble wall, set in and thus saved from ruin by 
the new wall of the Metal Exchange. These 
few square feet of stone were the sole remaining 
relic of the chapel of the old manor-house of 
Leadenhall — so named from its roofing of lead, 
rare in those days — which house had been pre- 
sented to the City of London by the munifi- 
cent Richard Whittington in 1408, to be used 
as a granary and market. It escaped the Great 
Fire, and its chapel was not torn down until 
June, 1812. This piece of its wall, having been 
preserved then, was built in with, and so formed 
part of, the old East India House. That fa- 
mous structure stretched its stately and severe 
fagade along Leadenhall Street just beyond 
Gracechurch Street, and so around the corner 
into Lime Street. It was, withal, a gloomy 




THE EAST INDIA HOUSE. 

[From an old print in the British Museum.] 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 27 



pile, with its many-columned Ionic portico. 
Its pediment contained a stone sovereign of 
Great Britain, holding an absurd umbrella- 
shaped shield over the sculptured figures of 
eastern commerce ; its front was dominated 
by Britannia comfortably seated, at her right 
Europe, on a horse, and at her left Asia, on 
a camel. 

Within its massive walls — holding memories 
of Warren Hastings and of Cornwallis, of Mill, 
gathering material for his history of India, and 
of Hoole, translating Tasso in leisure hours — 
were spacious halls and lofty rooms, statues and 
pictures, a museum of countless curiosities from 
the East. Beneath were vaults stored with a 
goodly share of the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, 
and dungeons wherein were found — on the 
downfall of John Company, in i860, and the 
destruction of his fortress a little later — chains 
and fetters, and a narrow passage leading to a 
concealed postern : these last for the benefit 
of the victims of John's press-gang, entrapped, 
drugged, shipped secretly down the river, and 
so sent across water to serve Clive and Coote 
as food for powder. 



28 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Upstairs, at a desk, sat Charles Lamb, keeping 
accounts in big books during '' thirty-three years 
of slavery," as he phrased it : of unfailing and 
untiring — albeit not untired — devotion to his 
duties, as his employers well knew. It was in 
April, 1792, just as he became seventeen, 
that he was first chained to this hard desk; 
and it came about in this way. 

John Lamb, the father, had got nearly to his 
dotage and quite to uselessness, and was pen- 
sioned off by his master about this period. The 
elder brother, dear little selfish, craving John, 
had grown into a broad, burly, jovial bachelor, 
wedded to his own ways ; living an easy life 
apart from them all ; " marching in quite an 
opposite direction," as his brother kindly puts 
it — speaking, as was his wont, not without ten- 
derness for him. He contributed nothing to 
the support of the family, and Mary added but 
little, beyond her own meagre maintenance by 
dress-making on a small scale — a trade she had 
taught herself. In her article on needlework, 
written in 18 14, for the British Ladys Maga- 
zine, sh.^ sdiys: "In early life I passed eleven 
years in the exercise of my needle for a liveli- 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 29 



hood." And so it seemed needful that the 
boy, not yet fifteen years old on leaving 
Christ's, should get to work to eke out the 
family's scanty income. 

John Lamb had a comfortable position in the 
South Sea House. It stood where now stands 
the Oriental Bank, at the end of Threadneedle 
Street, as you turn up into Bishopsgate Within : 
"its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, 
and disclosing to view a grave court, with 
cloisters and pillars." In his essay entitled 
"The South Sea House," Lamb has drawn the 
picture of the place within : its " stately por- 
ticos, imposing staircases, offices roomy as the 
state apartments in palaces ; . . . the oaken 
wainscots hung with pictures of deceased gov- 
ernors; . . . huge charts, which subsequent 
discoveries have antiquated ; dusty maps of 
Mexico, dim as dreams ; and soundings of the 
Bay of Panama!" All " long since dissipated 
or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking 
of that famous Bubble." 

Here Charles was given a desk, and here 
he worked, but at what work and with what 
wage we do not know. It was not for many 



30 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



months, however, for he soon received his 
appointment in the East India House through 
the kindness of Samuel Salt — the final kind- 
ness that came to the family from their 
aged well-doer ; for he died during that year, 
1792. The young accountant had but little 
^aste for, and still less knowledge of, the mer- 
cantile mysteries over which he was set to 
toil. He knew less geography than a school- 
boy of six weeks' standing, he said in mature 
manhood ; and a map of old Ortelius was as au- 
thentic as Arrowsmith to him. Of history and 
chronology he possessed some vague points, 
such as he could not help picking up in the 
course of his miscellaneous reading ; but he 
never deliberately, sat down to study any chron- 
icle of any country ! His friend Manning once, 
with great painstaking, got him to think that 
he understood the first proposition in Euclid, 
but gave him over in despair at the second. 
And, toil as toughly as he might over his ac- 
counts, he had to own, after years of adding, 
that ''I think I lose ^100 a year at the India 
House, owing solely to my want of neatness in 
making up my accounts." 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 31 



And yet, just the more uncongenial as was 
his labour, by just so much more did it tend 
in all ways to his good. Wordsworth said 
truly, with admirable acumen, that Lamb's 
submission to this mechanical employment 
placed him in fine contrast with other men 
of genius — his contemporaries — who, in sacri- 
ficing personal independence, made a wreck 
of their morality and honour. No such wreck 
did Charles Lamb make, and his peculiar 
pride prevented his sacrificing ever one iota 
of his independence. He could be no man's 
debtor nor dependant, and was content to cut 
his coat to suit his cloth, all his life long. His 
sole hatred, curiously enough, was for bank- 
rupts ; and he has portrayed with delicious 
irony, in his essay, *^The Two Races of Men " — 
the men who borrow and the men who lend — 
the contempt of the former for money, '' ac- 
counting it (yours and mine especially) no better 
than dross ! " 

The new clerk began with an annual salary of 
£70, to be increased by a small sum each year. 
Many huge account-books were filled with his 
figures — who knows what has become of them ? 



32 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



— and these he used to call his real works, filling 
some hundred folios on the shelves in Leaden- 
hall Street. His printed books, he claimed, 
were the solace and the recreations of his 
out-of-ofifice hours at home. 

That home was no 
longer in the Temple. 
The home there, of 
" snug firesides, the 
low-built roof, par- 
lours ten feet by ten, 
frugal board, and all 
the homeliness of 
home," had been 
given up, on the 
death of Mr. Salt; 
or, it may be, even 
earlier, for I am un- 
able to fix the date. 
The family had moved into poor lodgings, at 
No. 7 Little Queen Street, Holborn, where 
we find them during the year 1795. The site 
of this house, and of its adjoining neighbours 
on both sides, Nos. 6 and 8, is now occupied 
by Holy Trinity Church of Lincoln's Inn 




NO. 7 LITTLE QUEEN STREET. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 33 



Fields. The first house of the old row still 
standing is No. 9, and the side entrance of 
the Holborn Restaurant is No. 5 ; so that, 
you see, the windows of the Lamb lodgings 
looked out directly down Gate Street, their 
house exactly facing the western embouchure 
of that short and narrow street. 

I pass in front of the little church a score of 
times in a month, and each time I look with 
gladness at its ugly front, content that it has 
replaced the walls within which was enacted 
that terrible tragedy of September, 1796. The 
family was straitened direfuUy in means, and in 
miserable case in many ways ; the mother 
ailing helplessly, the father decaying rapidly in 
mind and body ; the aged aunt, more of a bur- 
den than a help, despite the scanty board she 
paid ; and the sister, suffering almost cease- 
lessly from attacks of her congenital gloom, 
submitting to the constant toil of her house- 
hold duties, of her dressmaking, and of nurs- 
ing her parents. Early in 1796 Charles wrote 
to Coleridge : *' My life has been somewhat 
diversified of late. The six weeks that finished 
last year and began this, your very humble 
3 



34 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



servant spent very agreeably in a mad-house 
at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, 
and don't bite any one. But mad I was ! " 
This was his only attack ; there was no more 
such agreeable diversity in his life, and he was 
cured by the most heroic of remedies. 

In the London Times of Monday, September 
26, 1796 — in which issue the editors " exult in 
the isolation and cutting off " of the various 
armies of the French Republic in Germany, 
and doubt the " alleged successes of the army 
in Italy reported to the Directory by General 
Buonaparte ; " in which the Right Honourable 
John, Earl of Chatham, is named Lord Pres- 
ident of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy 
Council ; and in which " Mr. Knowles, nephew 
and pupil of the late Mr. Sheridan," advertises 
that he has '' opened an English, French, and 
Latin preparatory school for a limited number 
of young gentlemen at No. 15 Brompton Cres- 
cent " — in this journal appeared the following: 

"■ On Friday afternoon, the coroner and a jury 
sat on the body of a lady in the neighbourhood 
of Holborn, who died in consequence of a 
wound from her daughter the preceding day. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 35 



It appeared, by the evidence adduced, that, 
while the family were preparing for dinner, the 
young lady seized a case-knife lying on the 
table, and in a menacing manner pursued a 
little girl, her apprentice, around the room. On 
the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she 
renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks, 
approached her parent. The child, by her 
cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the 
house, but too late. The dreadful scene pre- 
sented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the 
heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly stand- 
ing over her with the fatal knife, and the old 
man, her father, weeping by her side, himself 
bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a 
severe blow he had received from one of the 
forks she had been madly hurling about the 
room. 

" For a few days prior to this, the family had 
observed some symptoms of insanity in her, 
which had so much increased on the Wednes- 
day evening that her brother, early the next 
morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn : but that gentle- 
man was not at home. 

'' It seems that the young lady had been once 



36 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



before deranged. The jury, of course, brought 
in their verdict — LunacyT 

The True Briton said : " It appears that she 
had been before in the earUer part of her Hfe 
deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too 
much business. As her carriage toward her 
mother had always been affectionate in the ex- 
treme, it is believed her increased attachment 
to her, as her infirmities called for it by day and 
by night, caused her loss of reason at this time. 
It has been stated in some of the morning 
papers that she has an insane brother in con- 
finement ; but this is without foundation." 

I ask you to notice with what decent reti- 
cence, so far from the ways, and so foolish in 
the eyes, of our modern journalistic shameless- 
ness, all the names are suppressed in this report. 
It is certain that it would not be looked on 
with favour in the office of any enterprising 
journal, nowadays! One error the reporter did 
make ; it was not the landlord, but Charles, 
who came at the child's cries ; luckily at hand 
just in time to disarm his sister, and thus pre- 
vent further harm. 

So he was at hand from that day on, all 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 37 



through his Hfe, holding her and helping her 
in the frequent successive returns of her 
wretched malady. His gentle, loving, resolute 
soul proved its fine and firm fibre under the 
strain of more than forty years of undeviating 
devotion to which I know no parallel. He 
quietly gave up all other ties and cares and 
pleasures for this supreme duty ; he never for 
one hour remitted his vigil; he never repined 
or posed, he never even said to himself that 
he was doing something fine. And such is 
the potency of this intangible tonic of unsel- 
fish self-sacrifice, that Jiis tremulous nerves 
grew tenser under its action, and his reason 
relaxed her rule thenceforward never any 
more. The poor guiltless murderess was sent 
by the authorities to an asylum at Hoxton. 
There John Lamb and their friends thought 
it best to isolate her, safely and quietly, for 
life, spite of her intervals of sanity ; but, 
from the outset, Charles fought against this, 
offered his life-long personal guardianship — this 
boy of twenty-two, with only ^100 a year ! 
— and at length succeeded in squeezing con- 
sent from the crown officials. He counts 



}8 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



up, in a letter to Coleridge, the coin " Daddy 
and I " can spare for Mary, and computes all 
the care she will bring: ''I know John will 
make speeches about it, d?i^ sJie shall not go mto 
an hospital^ So he meets her as she comes 
out, and they walk away through life hand in 
hand, even as they used to walk through the 
fields many a time in later years on the ap- 
proach of one of her repeated relapses ; he lead- 
ing her back to temporary retirement in the 
asylum, hand in hand together, both silently 
crying ! 

The mother's body is laid in the graveyard of 
St. Andrew's, Holborn, the aunt is sent to other 
relatives, and the father's wound having speed- 
ily healed, Charles removed with him to lodg- 
ings at No. 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville, on 
the corner of Liverpool Road. It was a plain 
little wooden house, as you may see it por- 
trayed in the cut copied from W. Carew Haz- 
litt's "Charles and Mary Lamb." Now, there 
stands in its place a blazing brazen *'pub," 
quite in keeping with the squalid street. Its 
bar, like that favourite bar of Newman Noggs, 
'' faces both ways," in a hopeless attempt to 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



39 



cope all around with the unquenchable thirst 
of that quarter ! 

The new home, however, brought but slight 
brightening to the gloom and horror from 
which Charles 
had fled in the 
old home. It 
was shadowed by 
the almost ac- 
tual presence of 
the dead mother, 
and made even 
more dismal by 
the living ghost 
of the aged fa- 
ther, now *' in the 
decay of his facul- 
t i e s, palsy-smit- 
ten, in the last 
sad stage of hu- 
man weakness, a remnant most forlorn of what 
he was." He was released by death early in 
1799, and laid by his wife's side in the bury- 
ing-ground of St. Andrew's, Holborn ; the 
ground since then having been cut through and 




THE HOUst l.\ PENTONVILLE. 



40 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



wiped out by the construction of the Holborn 
viaduct. 

Old Aunt Hetty, " the kindest, goodest 
creature," had come back to them, but only to 
die ; and their faithful servant, who had fol- 
lowed their fortunes and their misfortunes, 
sickened slowly unto death. Mary had been 
allowed to return home for a while, from the 
rooms at Hackney, where Charles had placed 
her on her release from the asylum, and where 
he passed his Sundays and holidays with her. 
Now, she again broke down, and was forced 
to go back into seclusion at Hoxton. Then, 
for the one time in all his life, Charles gave 
way under these successive strokes, and made 
his only moan in a letter to Coleridge, early in 
1800: "Mary, in consequence of fatigue and 
anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to 
remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a 
house, with nothing but Hetty's dead body to 
keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and 
then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but 
a cat to remind me that the house has been 
full of living beings like myself. My heart is 
quite sunk, and I don't know where to look for 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 41 



relief. Mary will get better again, but her con- 
stantly being liable to these attacks is dreadful; 
nor is it the least of our evils that her case and 
all our story is so well known around us. We 
are in a manner i7tafked, ... I am going 
to try and get a friend to come and be with me 
to-morrow — I am completely shipwrecked." 

No, he was not completely wrecked, but ter- 
ribly tempest-tossed for a time ; and so at last 
— in the high phrase of Coleridge — " called by 
sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of 
hopes into quietness." 

But " marked " cruelly was the little family 
in very truth. Soon they were forced to make 
one more of their many repeated removes. 
Other quarters were offered them just then in 
the house of one John Mathew Gutch, who had 
been a schoolmate at Christ's of Lamb's, and 
was at that time a law stationer in South- 
ampton Buildings, Holborn. It was a most 
friendly and even generous offer, for Gutch 
knew the whole sad story, and the dangers, in 
all probability, portending. His house has been 
torn down only lately, along with the one hard 
by in which lived Hazlitt, twenty years later. 



42 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



It would be but the dreariest of records of 
the young clerk's three years at Pentonville, 
and of his earlier life in Little Queen Street, if 
one could point to nothing brighter than his 
anxiety, poverty, loneliness ; his dull days at 
his desk, his duller evenings at cribbage with 
his almost imbecile father. " I go home at 
night over-wearied, quite faint, and then to 
cards with my father, who will not let me 
enjoy a meal in peace." For he says — and to 
the son this is unanswerable! — ''If you won't 
play with me, you might as well not come 
home at all." He is not allowed to write a 
letter, he can go nowhere, he has no acquaint- 
ance. *' No one seeks or cares for my society, 
and I am left alone." The only literary man 
he knew was George Dyer ; who was '' good- 
ness itself," indeed, but not a stimulating com- 
panion. Sometimes he succeeded in slipping 
out to the theatre, of which he was as fond 
as, when a boy, he felt the delights he has 
delineated in "My First Play." These came 
back with added keenness to him now, after a 
long interval; for the scholars at Christ's had 
not been allowed to enter any play-house. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 43 



And there was solace for all his privations 
to be found in his beloved books, and he 
'' browsed " in many a field. '' I have no re- 
pugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for 
me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read 
anything which I call a book. There are things 
in that shape which I cannot allow for such." 
He had a spiritual kinship with the Eliza- 
bethans, and was worthy, in his own words, of 
listening to Shakespeare read aloud one of his 
scenes hot from his brain. Yet he was fond of 
the writers of the last century, and wished that 
he might be able to forget Fielding and Swift 
and the rest for the sake of reading them anew. 
For modern literature, save for a few favourite 
poems and for the works of his personal friends, 
he cared but little. For modern affairs he 
cared nothing, and knew nearly nothing about 
them. There is hardly a hint in his letters of 
the grim Napoleonic drama which was enacted 
during the younger years of the century ; he 
only grieved that War and Nature and Mr. Pitt 
should have conspired to increase the cost of 
coals and bread and beer ! He once heard a 
butcher in the market-place of Enfield say 



44 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



something about a change of ministry ; and it 
struck him that he neither knew nor cared who 
was in and who Was out. Indeed, he could 
not make these present times present to him- 
self, and lived in the past, so that the so- 
called realities of life seemed its mockeries 
to him. *' Hang the age! I will write for an- 
tiquity," he told the able editor who criticised 
'^ his style as not in keeping with the taste of the 
age. In truth, he was a walking anachronism, 
and beneath his nineteenth-century waistcoat 
pulsated a heart of the seventeenth century — 
that of Sir Thomas Browne, perchance. 

Lamb's first appearance in print was made 
anonymously during these dreary days, in the 
Mornmg Chronicle, and consisted of a sonnet 
to Mrs. Siddons, whom he had seen for the 
first time, and who had profoundly impressed 
him. This sonnet and three others formed his 
share of a small volume of '* Poems on Various 
Subjects," mainly by Coleridge, issued under 
the latter's name in the spring of 1796. His 
preface says : *' The effusions signed C. L. were 
written by Mr. Charles Lamb of the India 
House. Independently of the signature, their 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 45 



superior merit would have sufficiently distin- 
guished them." In the summer of 1797 ap- 
peared a second edition, '*to which are now 
added poems by Charles Lamb and Charles 
Lloyd " — the former contributing about fifteen 
short poems. This Lloyd was the son of a Bir- 
mingham banker, a morbid young man addicted 
to rhyme and to melancholy — a recent acquaint- 
ance of Lamb's, and one who could not have 
been a cheerful comrade for him, just then. 

In 1798 appeared '* A Tale of Rosamund Gray 
and Old Blind Margaret," as its original title 
ran. It is the best known of his works after 
his essays, and we all echo Shelley's words to 
Leigh Hunt : *' What a lovely thing is ' Rosa- 
mund Gray'! How much knowledge of the 
sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it ! " 
And yet this " miniature romance," as Talfourd 
well named it, surely seems somewhat unreal 
and artificial, for all its charm ! 

Lamb found constant comfort, too, during 
these dark years, in his only two intimate 
friends : Coleridge, with whom he had renewed 
his companionship, broken by Coleridge's visit to 
Germany, and by his six months' service in the 



46 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Light Dragoons ; and Southey, whose healthy 
and wholesome common-sense was just then a 
timely tonic for Lamb. These three youthful 
dreamers used to sit and smoke and speculate of 
nights in a little den at the back of the Salu- 
tation and Cat — a tavern at No. 17 Newgate 
Street, nearly opposite the old School. Two of 
them may haply have learned their way there 
while still scholars ! " I image to myself that 
little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, 
where we have sat together through the winter 
nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy," 
Lamb wrote, later ; and he refers more than 
once to '' that nice little smoky room at the 
Salutation, which is even now continually pre- 
senting itself to my recollection, with all its 
associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, 
welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry." They 
say that the wary landlord, to whom Coleridge's 
rhapsodies were quite unintelligible, yet who 
fully understood their value in drawing a knot 
of thirsty listeners, offered the Talker free 
quarters for life, if he would stay and talk ! 

The men who sit and smoke and soak in tap- 
rooms, and who never know when they are 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 47 



full in any sense, are just the sort to find copi- 
ous refreshment in such eternal monologue. 
Carlyle's concise dictum thereanent would have 
fallen flat on their pendulous ears : " To sit as 
a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether 
one like it or not, can in the end be exhilarat- 
ing to no creature!" 

The old tavern — so old, that within its walls 
Sir Christopher Wren used to sit often with his 
pipe, coming in tired from the rebuilding of St. 
Paul's, just around the corner — has itself been 
rebuilt, the little smoky room is wiped out, the 
Cat has vanished, and the Salutation greets 
us as a slap-bang City eating-house and bar. 
Before the destruction of the original inn, an 
old fellow, who had been a Grecian in Lamb's 
time, used to hobble up the entrance-way, once 
a year, when he came to some great function of 
the Blue-Coats, and look longingly into that 
once ''murmurous haunt" through the glass 
door. Invited to enter one day, he stood in 
the smoking-room for a while, his eyes wet and 
his voice husky ; then he went away, never to 
reappear. Doubtless he had drunk and smoked 
through many of those "O noctes coenceque 



48 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Deum ! Anglice — Welsh rabbit, punch, and 
poesy," in Lamb's words. 

Another favourite resort of the three cronies 
was The Feathers, a dirty, dingy, deHghtful 
tavern, as I have seen it, in Hand Court, Hol- 
born, nearly opposite the Great Turnstile lead- 
ing into Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was only 
two minutes' walk from the lodgings in Little 
Queen Street, and but a few houses distant 
from the oil-shop of Charles's godfather, at the 
corner of Featherstone Buildings and Holborn. 
The Feathers has gone to its own place, a modern 
something maddens me on its site, and all that 
I have been able to rescue is the quaint sign 
which hung until lately above the entrance of 
the court in Holborn, and looked down on the 
frequent goings in and out of our friends. 

It was while living in Pentonville that Lamb 
passed through his second, and his final, love- 
sickness. His first attack had been caused by 
undue exposure, when a guileless youth, unpro- 
tected by proper prophylactics, to the provoca- 
tive charms of the " Alice Winterton " of his 
later writings. It is believed that her real name 
was Ann Simmons, and that he used to meet 




iff m t^^^i ^ 




Ke 



'Ite&r^i^^:-- 
























THE FEATHERS TAVERN. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 49 



her during his holidays at his grandmother's 
place. For, with all his delightful egoistic 
frankness in prattling about himself, this was 
the one point too tender to be touched on, 
seriously or jocularly, ever to any one. It is 
of her, surely, that he is thinking in two of his 
four sonnets in the Coleridge collection, where- 
in he speaks of his " fancied wanderings with 
a fair-haired 'maid." He placed the scene of 
" Rosamund Gray " in the cottage where lived 
Ann Simmons, near Widford, not far from 
Blakesware ; and they show to sentimental 
strangers that portion of the cluster of cot- 
tages still left. They claim that it is her por- 
trait which he drew for that of his heroine, 
even as he is the Allan Clare of the little 
story. He certainly hints, just for once, at 
this love scrape in that letter to Coleridge in 
which he speaks of his six weeks' stay in the 
Hoxton Asylum : '* It may convince you of 
my regard for you when I tell you that my 
head ran on you in my madness, as much 
almost as on another person, who I am inclined 
to think was the more immediate cause of my 
temporary frenzy." But his recovery from 
4 



50 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



both derangements was radical and permanent, 
and he was able to say, only a little later: ''I 
am pleased and satisfied with myself that this 
weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, 
Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my 
poor old father." That wedding to the for- 
tunes of his sister was his life-long union, and 
haply saved him from any other, which would 
have harmed, rather than have helped, this 
man ; and would have sacrificed deplorably this 
vivid personality on the altar of the greatly- 
glorified god, the infestive Humdrum. 

His serene good sense asserted its strength, 
at no time and in no way, so signally as in his 
absolute emancipation from this transient en- 
slavement ; and in his sedate statement of the 
fact — 'true in so many cases where the victim is 
too stupid to know it or too timorous to own it 
— that, ** if it drew me out of some vices, it also 
prevented the growth of many virtues." 

As is usual, however, with the amatory in- 
firmity, he suffered from that slight and super- 
ficial relapse, later in life, to which I have 
already referred. In his daily goings to and 
fro in Islington, he used to meet the lovely 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 51 



Quakeress, to whom he never spoke, and whom 
he adored silently and from afar. He only knew 
that she was named Hester, and it is her name 
which he has made immortal and her sweet 
memory which he has embalmed imperishably 
in his exquisite verses : 

"When maidens such as Hester die/' 

And his first, his serious, affair may have justi- 
fied its existence by recalling to us his well- 
known wish that no incident, no untoward acci- 
dent even, of his life might have been reversed. 
So it is, that in his " New Year's Eve " he avers 
that *' it is better that I should have pined 
away seven of my goldenest years, when I was 
thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice 
W n, than that so passionate a love-adven- 
ture should be lost." 



III. 



*' I AM going to change my lodgings, having 
received a hint that it would be agreeable, at 
Our Lady's next feast. I have partly fixed upon 
most delectable rooms, which look out (when 
you stand a-tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey 
Hills, at the upper end of King's Bench Walk, 
in the Temple. There I shall have all the pri- 
vacy of a house without the encumbrance, and 
shall be able to lock my friends out, as often as 
I desire to hold free converse with any immor- 
tal mind — for my present lodgings resemble a 
minister's levee, I have so increased my ac- 
quaintance (as they call 'em) since I have resided 
in town." In this letter, written to Manning 
early in i8oi, three significant points call for 
comment. The phrase '^ in town," referring to 
his residence in Southampton Buildings, shows 
how his previous abode in Islington was then 
in the country, and how the squalid houses of 
the foul Chapel Street of to-day have sup- 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 53 



planted those pleasant cottages set in gardens, 
with rural lanes cutting the fields between. 
His curt reference to their " having received a 
hint " to move, proves how pitifully they were 
''marked," as he had already put it, and how 
soon even the kindly Gutch withdrew his offer 
of shelter. The few words, " I have so in- 
creased my acquaintance " give a wide sugges- 
tion of the already growing attraction of this 
odd, original young character to all bright 
minds and sweet natures with whom he came 
in contact. 

And so, on Lady Day, March 25, 1801, he and 
Mary moved into the Temple, there to begin, 
near their childhood home, that life of ''dual 
loneliness," never again broken in upon : con- 
soled by their mutual affection, cheered by their 
common tastes, brightened by the companion- 
ship of congenial beings. In the Temple they 
remained for seventeen years, living in two sets 
of chambers during that period. After eight 
years' abode at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, 
they were compelled to quit, their landlord 
wanting the rooms for himself. Towards the 
end of March, 1809, in a letter to Manning, then 



54 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



in China, Lamb wrote as if he were in the next 
street : " While I think of it, let me tell you 
we are moved. Don't come any more to Mitre 
Court Buildings. We are at 34 Southampton 
Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here 
till about the end of May, when we remove to 
No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to 
live and die." 

Their home in Southampton Buildings dur- 
ing these few months while changing chambers 
still stands intact ; a delightful old square, solid, 
brick house, just in front of the tiny garden of 
Staple Inn. But both blocks of buildings in 
which he lived during those seventeen years 
in the Temple have been torn down and re- 
placed by modern structures. 

Although he disliked leaving the old cham- 
bers, he found the new set, on the third and 
fourth floors of No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, 
" far more commodious and roomy. . . . The 
rooms are delicious, and the best look back 
into Hare Court, where there is a pump always 
going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees 
come in at the window, so that it is like living 
in a garden ! " This was written to Coleridge, 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 55 



in June, 1809; and to Manning, in letters dur- 
ing this period, Lamb spoke of the churchyard- 
like court having " three trees and a pump in 
it. Do you know it ? I was born near it, 
and used to drink at that pump when I was a 
Rechabite of six years old . . . the water 
of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not 
very insipid without. Here I hope to set up 
my rest and not quit till Mr. Powell, the un- 
dertaker, gives me notice that I may have pos- 
session of my last lodging. He lets lodgings 
for single gentlemen. ... I should be 
happy to see you any evening. Bring any of 
your friends, the Mandarins, with you." 

He did, indeed, as he often complained, hate 
and dread unaccustomed places, but he was 
well content to discover that this new habita- 
tion had " more aptitudes for growing old than 
you shall often see." 

It was here that Mary made the memorable 
find of an empty adjoining garret of four un- 
tenanted, unowned rooms ; of which they took 
possession by degrees, and to which Charles 
could escape from his too frequent friends, who 
had more leisure than himself. Here he did 



56 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



his literary work in secrecy and silence, " as 
much alone as if he were in a lodging in the 
midst of Salisbury Plain." They never knew to 
whom these chambers rightly belonged, and they 
were never dispossessed. So all was well with 
him, and even in his whimsical perversity he was 
able to complain only that there was another 
'' Mr. Lamb " not far from him ; " his duns and 
his girls frequently stumble up to me, and I am 
obhged to satisfy both in the best way I am able." 

The staircase of the new building is still 
stumbled up by duns and girls, you may drink 
from that same pump to-day, you may see those 
trees still in that court, but /ns windows no 
longer look out on trees and pump and court. 

Talfourd and Procter have left vivid pictures 
of the memorable Wednesday evenings in the 
Temple, the former contrasting them with the 
stately assemblages of Holland House. " Like 
other great men, I have a public day," Lamb 
wrote. He loved men, and he had a rare ca- 
pacity for getting at the best they had in them, 
a real reverence for their abilities, a kindly sym- 
pathy with their diverse tastes, and a most 
friendly frankness as to all their foibles. " How 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 57 



could I hate him ? " he asked of some one : 
" Don't I know him ? I never could hate any- 
one I knew." He looked so constantly and so 
closely into the strange faces of calamity, that 
he yearned always for the nearness of friendly 
features. Above all, he understood, as Goethe 
did, '' how mighty is the goddess of propin- 
quity ; " and although he was so untiring and 
prolific and delightful in his letters to absent 
friends, he insisted that " one glimpse of the 
human face and one shake of the human hand 
is better than whole reams of this thin, cold 
correspondence ; yea, of more worth than all 
the letters that have sweated the fingers of sen- 
sibility from Madame Sevigne and Balzac to 
Sterne and Shenstone." 

So it came to pass that his little rooms in the 
Temple held a motley crowd. Low-browed 
rooms they were, set about with worn, homely, 
home-like furniture ; his favourite books — his 
sole extravagance — in their shelves all about. 
His ragged veterans, he called them ; ^' the fin- 
est collection of shabby books I ever saw; such 
a number of first-rate works in very bad con- 
dition is, I think, nowhere to be found," is 



58 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Crabb Robinson's caustic comment on them. 
In narrow black frames, on the walls of his best 
room, hung " a choice collection of the works 
of Hogarth, an English painter of some hu- 
mour." The sideboard was already spread by 
Mary with cold beef, porter, punch ; tobacco 
and pipes were at hand, and tables made ready 
for whist. This is Charles's invitation : *' Swipes 
exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, 
wzfk argument ; difference of opinion expected 
to take place about eleven ; perfect unanim- 
ity with some haziness and dimness before 
twelve!" He used to play right through his 
programme. His old cronies came, " friendly 
harpies," he named many of them : for, as he 
said of the pretended dead EHa, his intimados 
were, to confess a truth, in the world's eye, a 
ragged regiment. He never forsook a friend, 
ragged or rich in raiment or in repute, and " the 
burrs stuck to him ; but they were good and 
loving burrs for all that." It was the simple 
statement of a truth which he had made, long 
before this : " I cannot scatter friendships like 
chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine 
hand, like hour-glass sand." 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 59 



New acquaintances came, too ; never men of 
fame or fortune or fashion, but men of mark, 
you may be sure. And many among them 
notable only for some tincture of the absurd 
in their characters : for " I love a Fool,'' he 
said, " as naturally as if I were of kith and 
kin to him." Crabb Robinson has left us his 
reminiscence of this place and these people, 
when speaking of his first acquaintance with 
the Lambs : " They were then living in a gar- 
ret in Inner Temple Lane. In that humble 
apartment I spent many happy hours, and 
saw a greater number of excellent persons 
than I had ever seen collected together in one 
room." Thus has he summed up, in his sedate 
way, all that need be said on that score. 

The capricious Coleridge had once more be- 
come constant, after his refusal for two years to 
write, and his needless estrangement, which had 
called forth Lamb's lines, '^ I had a friend, a 
kinder friend had no man ; " and of whom, after 
many years, he yet was able to say : " The 
more I see of him in the quotidian undress and 
relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to 
love him and believe him a very good man." 



6o Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



There was HazHtt — trying to paint when Lamb 
first met him, finding later his true calling as 
art critic and essayist ; easily first of all in that 
field, before or after him, in insight, breadth, 
and vigour ; arrogant, intense, bitter, brooding 
forever over the fall of Napoleon : the only 
male creature he reverenced except Coleridge. 
He must needs respect, in Coleridge, the one 
man known to him who alone could surpass 
him in untiring fluency, even under the in- 
fluence of strongest tea — sole stimulus allowed 
himself by Hazlitt at that time. Him, Lamb 
finds to be, " in his natural state, one of the 
wisest and finest spirits breathing." And he, 
too, had tried to quarrel with the Lambs, and 
had failed, as did all who made the sorry at- 
tempt ! There was William Wordsworth, as- 
cetic, self-centred, quite sure of himself ; whose 
true powers, and all that was genuine in his 
genius. Lamb was one of the first to recognize 
and to celebrate. There was Godwin, so bold 
in his speculations, so daring with his pen, so 
placid in person, and so mild of voice. This 
terrifying radical used to prattle on trivial 
topics till after supper, and then invariably 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 6i 



fall fast asleep. '^ A very well-behaved decent 
man, . . . quite a tame creature, I assure 
you ; a middle-sized man, both in stature 
and understanding," wrote his keen-eyed host. 
There was old Captain Burney, afterward 
admiral, son of the famous organist, bro- 
ther of the more famous writing-woman, 
Fanny, Madame d'Arblay. He had been 
taught by Eugene Aram, he had sailed all 
around the globe with Captain Cook, and 
was still young and tender in heart under his 
rough exterior. There was his son, Martin, of 
whom Lamb said, " I have not found a whiter 
soul than thine ; " Leigh Hunt, airy, sprightly, 
full of fine fancies ; Charles Lloyd, poetic and 
intense ; Tom Hood, slight of figure, feeble of 
voice, face of a Methodist parson, silent save 
for his sudden puns ; Thomas Manning, the 
Cambridge mathematical tutor, '' a man of a 
thousand; " Basil Montagu, the philanthropized 
courtier ; stalwart Allan Cunningham ; Hay- 
don, the painter, eager everywhere for contro- 
versy ; the preacher, Edward Irving, content 
to listen, there ; Bernard Barton, Quaker poet, 
bank drudge; gentle and genial Barry Corn- 



62 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



wall ; Talfourd, the sympathetic chronicler of 
these scenes ; constant and trusty Crabb Rob- 
inson ; De Quincey, self-involved and some- 
times spiteful, yet not behind any one of that 
brilliant band in his love for Lamb, whom he 
earnestly attests to be '' the noblest of human 
beings." 

There appeared sometimes at these gather- 
ings a most curious character, hardly known 
now as one of this group, but remembered 
rather from the parts he plays in the pages of 
Bulwer and of Dickens. This was Thomas 
Wainewright, the *' Janus Weathercock " of the 
London Magazine ; a flimsy, plausible, conceited 
scoundrel, in whom Lamb good-naturedly found 
something to like. It was after our friend's 
death that Wainewright's thefts and poisonings 
brought him to trial, and sent him to Van 
Diemen's land, where the dandy convict died in 
madness, raving and unrepentant. 

And Charles Lamb, the central and dom- 
inating personality of all these strong charac- 
ters, towers above them all, not only and not 
so much by the greatness of his gifts as by 
that of his character. For simplicity, sincerity. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 63 



singleness of soul — all that is childlike in genius 
— all those qualities which go to make up 
greatness of character — these were his. He 
was always young. To that scoffer who, sneer- 
ing at Lamb's habits, said that no man ought 
to be a Bohemian after the age of thirty, as to 
all the scoffers since, there is only the one old 
answer — Lamb never got to be thirty. 

** Of all men of genius I ever knew," said 
Crabb Robinson — and he knew all that were 
going in his day ! — " Charles Lamb was the one 
most intensely and universally to be loved." 
Among them all, he alone was known by his 
first name ; just as, at school, he had been, as 
he always best liked to be, '^ Charles " to the 
other boys : *' so Christians should call one 
another," he used to say. Reason revolts and 
imagination cowers appalled before the forlorn 
and hopeless conception of Wordsworth ad- 
dressed as " Willie," or Coleridge as " Sam " ! 
For, you see, t/zzs man never posed, never 
paraded himself, had no jealousy, nor petu- 
lance, nor pettiness. He never lied for effect, 
nor harboured hypocrisies, big or little. He 
was lucky in possessing that supreme antidote 



64 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



to the pernicious poison of conceit — an abiding 
sense of humour — " a genius in itself, and so 
defends from the insanities/' in Emerson's wise 
words. Your solemn ass must needs take 
himself seriously ; the man of deep, keen, quick 
perception of the ludicrous can never do so. 
When Coleridge, during a visit of the brother 
and sister to him at Nether Stowey, addressed 
to Lamb his maudlin lines, entitled '' This 
Lime-Tree Bower my Prison," in which he 
gushes over " my gentle-hearted Charles," the 
victim of these verses rebelled. " For God's 
sake, don't make me ridiculous by terming 
me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better 
verse I Substitute drunken dog, ragged-head, 
seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, and any 
other epithet which truly and properly belongs 
to the gentleman in question." 

" Stat magni nominis umbra " is Lucan's 
stately phrase, to be aptly applied, in its best 
and original sense, to almost every one of this 
illustrious group. Yet, lofty as they loom in 
the distance, far above our power as well as our 
desire to belittle them, it may be not beyond 
belief that too close and too constant contact 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 65 



with some of them might have brought at the 
last a certain satiety. It may even be breathed, 
without irreverence and therefore without 
offence, that we might have been just a bit 
bored if allowed to listen without rest to 
Coleridge, with his rhetorical preachments and 
his melancholy, both born of rheumatism, rum, 
and opium ; or to Hazlitt, with his ingrained 
selfishness, his petulance, his tea-inspired tur- 
gidity ; or to Wordsworth, solemnly weighted 
with the colossal conviction of his own mission, 
and tireless in his tenacity to attest the truth 
thereof to all listeners. These, and all those 
lesser ones, seem to me petty and tiresome 
beside this spare, silent, stammering little 
fellow% who loved them all and laughed at them 
all ; who gave them fitting reverence, and yet, 
with affectionate adroitness, found fun in their 
foibles ! 

How direct and delicate was his gibe when 
Coleridge had been longer even than usual in 
his endless endeavours to spin serviceable 
ropes with his metaphysical sands: "Oh, you 
mustn't mind what Coleridge says ; he's so full 
of his fun." I can see his twinkling eyes — 
5 



66 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



those wonderfully sparkling eyes — as he an- 
swered Coleridge's question, " Charles, did you 
ever hear me preach ? " ^' I never heard you do 
anything else ! " Coleridge was, indeed, quite 
capable, in Hazlitt's sarcastic phrase, of taking 
up the deep pauses of conversation between 
seraphs and cardinals ; and could have argued 
— with the same ready confidence with which, 
according to mocking Sydney Smith, Lord 
John Russell would have assumed command, 
at half an hour's notice, of the channel fleet 
— on either side of the theses sent him by 
Lamb just before he went to Germany. 
These questions — " to be defended or op- 
pugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen," by 
Coleridge — are deliciously sly and sharp in 
their stab at the complacent superiority over 
lesser gifted mortals felt and shown by that 
^' archangel a little damaged." I can hear the 
falsetto tone of his moralities growing shriller 
before these two questions, especially, among 
the others : " Whether God loves a lying 
angel better than a true man?" "Whether 
the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever 
sneer / 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 67 



How deftly he punctured Wordsworth's sub- 
lime conceit, on his hinting that other poets 
might have equalled Shakespeare if they cared. 
" Oh, here's Wordsworth says he could have 
written * Hamlet ' if he d had the mind. It is 
clear that nothing is wanting but the mind ! "y 
Even the Infallible One not only tolerated, but 
valued, the acute criticisms with which Lamb 
leavened his discerning praise of all his friends' 
work ; but when he, with kindly frankness, 
rated a little lower than did their author the 
" Lyrical Ballads," that author got into quite 
a state of mind. He 'Svrote four sweating 
pages" to inspire Lamb with a '' greater range 
of sensibility ; " and the tormented critic bursts 
out : " After one's been reading Shakespeare for 
twenty of the best years of one's life, to have 
a fellow start up and prate about some unknown 
quality possessed by Shakespeare less than by 
Milton and William Wordsworth ! . . . What 
am I to do with such people ? I shall certainly 
write 'em a very merry letter." I wish that 
letter had been saved for our delectation. 

Then there was Manning, with his slight 
sense of humour, and to him — then in China, 



68 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



to his friend's loss — Lamb loved to write the 
maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest 
whims about their friends. To Coventry Pat- 
more, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an 
amazing letter : '' If you go through Boulogne, 
inquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he 
got home from the Crusades. He must be a 
very old man now." 

Good, honest barrister Martin Burney — of the 
" If dirt were trumps " story — gave infinite fun 
to Lamb by his oddities. Once he read aloud, 
in their rooms, the whole Gospel of St. John, 
because biblical quotations are very emphatic 
in a court of justice. At another time he in- 
sisted on carving the fowl — and did it most ill- 
favouredly — because it was indispensable for a 
barrister to do all such things well. '* Those 
little things were of more consequence than we 
thought ! " Burney quite approved of Shake- 
speare, " because he was so much of a gentle- 
man;" and he said and did so many queer things 
that Lamb wrote : " Why does not his guardian 
angel look to him? He deserves one ; maybe 
he has tired him out ! " 

It was George Dyer, above all, in whom 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 69 



Lamb revelled, and who was meat and drink to 
him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watch- 
man and butcher, had been a charity-school boy 
at Christ's, and had become a publisher's harm- 
less drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating 
his way through thick tomes, but digesting lit- 
tle. He seemed to find all the nourishment 
he needed in the husks of knowledge, while 
Lamb, in radical contrast, bit to the kernel 
with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer's heart, 
however, his friend was sure that God never 
put a kinder into the flesh of man ; and his 
was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so 
absent-minded that he would sometimes empty 
his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea 
for his guests ; and so near-sighted that he 
once walked placidly into the river, as I shall 
hereafter relate. He used to keep his " neat 
library" in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary 
Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his chambers 
one day in his absence, " tidied-up " the rooms 
and sewed fast that out-of-repair easy-chair, 
with his books within it : whereat, to use his 
own violent language, he was greatly discon- 
certed ! 



70 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Lamb gives a ludicrous description of his 
visit to these same chambers in Clifford's Inn, 
where he found Dyer, " in mid-winter , wearing 
nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, 
which the said heathen did pertinaciously 
affirm to be new. These were absolutely in- 
grained with the accumulated dirt of ages, but 
he affirmed 'em to be clean. He was going to 
visit a lady who was nice about those things, 
and that's the reason he wore nankeen that 
day I" It was to this credulous creature that 
Lamb confided that the secret author of 
" Waverley " was Lord Castlereagh ! And once 
he sent the guileless one to Primrose Hill at 
sunrise, to see the Persian Ambassador perform 
his orisons ! No one but Dyer could have said 
that the assassin of the Ratcliffe Highway — 
painted so luridly by De Quincey in his 
" Three Memorable Murders " — " must have 
been rather an eccentric character ! " 

Haydon, the painter, has told of one memo- 
rable evening in his own studio, when Lamb 
was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal 
Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be 
introduced to Wordsworth, and who insisted 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 71 



on having the latter's opinion as to whether 
Milton and Newton were not great geniuses. 
Lamb took a candle and walked over to the 
poor man, saying, " Sir, will you allow me to 
look at your phrenological development ? " 
Haydon and Keats got him away, but he 
persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, 
*' Do let me have another look at that gentle- 
man's organs." Edgar Poe's Imp of the Per- 
verse took entire possession of Lamb when 
thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him 
to give the impression of " something between 
an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon." Writing 
of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, 
he says, truly: *' He never greatly cared for 
the society of what are called good people. If 
any of these were scandalized (and offences 
were sure to arise) he could not help it." 

No, nor did he try to help it, and we love 
him all the more for this antic disposition he 
was so fond of showing unshamed. And I 
think that we need not grieve greatly because 
his vagaries were not kept always "within the 
limits of becoming mirth," when he had to deal 
with prigs, pedants, or poseurs. Tom Moore, 



72 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look down 
on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accu- 
rately sounded the shoals of his shallow insin- 
cerity. The portentous Macready has left on 
record his unfavourable impression of the 
irreverent creature who stood in no awe 
of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. 
That impression pains us no more than does 
the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. 
He found Lamb's talk to be but " a ghastly 
make-believe of wit," '' contemptibly small ; " 
and in all that was said and done he saw, 
from his own humane point of view, noth- 
ing but "diluted insanity." Curtly and cruelly 
he labelled this brother and sister, '' two very 
sorry phenomena." 

If our friend laughed at others, he was just 
as ready to laugh at himself ; and his hissing his 
own play is historic. It is strange that, with 
his keen critical sense, he should have hoped 
for the success of this " Mr. H., A Farce in Two 
Acts; " produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, with 
the great EUiston in the title-role. Yet he had 
written to Manning in boyish glee: "All China 
shall ring with it — by and by." In the same 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 73 



letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders 
he was to give for admission, elate with antic- 
ipation of the long run his piece was to have. 
He sat on the opening night with Mary and 
Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit (his 
favourite place), and joined with the audience 
in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, 
as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he 
was louder than any of them in their hisses. 
" Damn the word, I write it like kisses — how 
different ! " he growled, in grotesque wrath, in 
his letter announcing the failure to Words- 
worth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of 
that dreadful damning every night for a month, 
but Lamb only wrote to him : " I know you'll 
be sorry, but never mind. We are deter- 
mined not to be cast down. I am going to 
leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. 
A smoky man must write smoky farces." He 
and Mary were " pretty stout " about it, but, 
after all, they would rather have had success, 
he had to own. For he not only longed for 
the fame, but he needed the money, which 
that success in dramatic authorship would 
have brought. 



72 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look down 
on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accu- 
rately sounded the shoals of his shallow insin- 
cerity. The portentous Macready has left on 
record his unfavourable impression of the 
irreverent creature who stood in no awe 
of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. 
That impression pains us no more than does 
the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. 
He found Lamb's talk to be but " a ghastly 
make-believe of wit," " contemptibly small ; " 
and in all that was said and done he saw, 
from his own humane point of view, noth- 
ing but " diluted insanity." Curtly and cruelly 
he labelled this brother and sister, '' two very 
sorry phenomena." 

If our friend laughed at others, he was just 
as ready to laugh at himself ; and his hissing his 
own play is historic. It is strange that, with 
his keen critical sense, he should have hoped 
for the success of this " Mr. H., A Farce in Two 
Acts ; " produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, w^ith 
the great Elliston in the title-role. Yet he had 
written to Manning in boyish glee: "All China 
shall ring with it — by and by." In the same 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 73 



letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders 
he was to give for admission, elate with antic- 
ipation of the long run his piece was to have. 
He sat on the opening night with Mary and 
Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit (his 
favourite place), and joined with the audience 
in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, 
as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he 
was louder than any of them in their hisses. 
'' Damn the word, I write it like kisses — how 
different ! " he growled, in grotesque wrath, in 
his letter announcing the failure to Words- 
worth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of 
that dreadful damning every night for a month, 
but Lamb only wrote to him : '' I know you'll 
be sorry, but never mind. We are deter- 
mined not to be cast down. I am going to 
leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. 
A smoky man must write smoky farces." He 
and Mary were " pretty stout " about it, but, 
after all, they would rather have had success, 
he had to own. For he not only longed for 
the fame, but he needed the money, which 
that success in dramatic authorship would 
have brought. 



76 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



as delightful as it is original." In the same 
paper, he spoke arrogantly and offensively of 
Leigh Hunt, his own political enemy, and 
Lamb's most dear and most unjustly perse- 
cuted friend. From so close a companion as 
Southey had been, and one who knew him 
so thoroughly, this hurt Lamb deeply, and he 
wrote to Bernard Barton : " But I love and 
respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate 
his review and his being a reviewer." And in 
the London Magazine he put forth the manly 
*' Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq. ; " of 
which the latter said that "no resentful let- 
ter was ever written less offensively." Then 
Southey — an exemplary if over-righteous mor- 
tal — sent Lamb a line of regret and affection, 
and Lamb wrote generously back, and the mists 
were melted away, and their friendship shone 
more steadfastly than ever. Indeed, it seems 
to me that Southey eclipsed Lamb in the spirit 
he showed in this reconciliation, forasmuch 
as he proved himself fine enough to forgive 
the man whom he had outraged. We may 
commend his conduct ; " For right, too rigid, 
hardens into wrong." 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 77 



It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb's 
religious belief. Suffice it to say that it was, 
like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be 
labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be 
packed within church or cathedral walls. It is 
a stale truism that credence, less than charac- 
ter, is the criterion of conviction ; and all his- 
tory shows that the doubters are, in nearly all 
cases, the most deeply devout. "He prayeth 
well who loveth well," Coleridge had learned ; 
and it is my fancy that those lives, where love 
with voluntary humility waited on self-sacri- 
fice, had taught him the immanent truth — " He 
prayeth best^ who loveth best." 

As to Lamb's utterances about these mighty 
matters, we may be sure that they took the 
tone of the man's utterances concerning all 
matters; and to them we may apply Hazlitt's 
phrase : '^ His jests scald like tears, and he 
probes a question with a play upon words." 
Or, as Haydon put it, " He stuttered out his 
quaintness in snatches, like the fool in ' Lear'." 



IV. 



lis" the midst of the vast Covent Garden prop- 
erty of the Duke of Bedford is wedged a small 
piece of alien land, on the corner of Bow and 
Russell streets. It belongs to a certain Clayton 
estate, and is covered by three houses, which 
are worth more to us than all the potentialities 
of marketable wealth hereabout. These three 
houses formed but one building, at the time of 
erection ; which was late in the last or early in 
the present century, as we may be convinced by 
every architectural point of proof without and 
within. It was built on the site of that famous 
ancient structure whose upper floor was occu- 
pied by Will's Coffee-House ; its cellars and 
foundations still to be traced under the esti- 
mable Ham and Beef Shop on that corner. 
To-day, this popular establishment is thronged 
for us, not with its actual eager buyers of cold 
baked meats, but with the shades of Addison, 
Swift, Smollett, Steele, Dryden, Gibber, Gay, 



__- ^ r\ 





» / ^ T • ^ — — a^ r ,T-:„^a, ,^ W J. ■ 











-■Ttll^/^ 










NO. 20 RUSSELL STREET, COVEKT GARDEN. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 79 



Pepys, Johnson, revisiting their once favourite 
foregathering place. 

Of the three houses into which this block of 
buildings has been divided, the corner house 
remains entirely unaltered. Its neighbour, in 
Bow Street — now a swarming tavern — has suf- 
fered somewhat at the hand of the modern re- 
storer. It retains, on its upper floor, a small 
barred cell, formerly set apart for some exclu- 
sive or elusive prisoner from Bow Street sta- 
tion, just at hand. 

The house which chiefly concerns us, No. 
20 Russell Street, has been made higher by one 
story, re-roofed, and re-faced with stucco ; but 
it has not been distinctly disfeatured. 

Such as it was, it became the next home of 
the Lambs, in 181 7. At that time they had 
lived for nine years in their chambers in Inner 
Temple Lane, and it is strange that they 
should have been willing to leave their be- 
loved Temple, after having been born into it 
again, and after having grown up in it again. 
For Lamb's household gods planted a terrible 
fixed foot, as he put it, and were not rooted 
up without blood. " I thought we could never 



8o Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



have been torn up from the Temple," he 
wrote ; yet they did so tear themselves up, 
and we are left to conjecture, for their reasons. 
Mary told Dorothy Wordsworth that the 
rooms had got dirty and out of repair, and 
that the cares of living in chambers had 
grown more irksome each year. More weighty 
among their motives, no doubt, was the desire 
to escape the incessant invasion of their pri- 
vacy by welcome, and yet unwelcome, friends. 
From this wear and tear they were not freed 
by their flight, however. 

In November, 1817, Lamb wrote to Dorothy 
Wordsworth : " We are in the individual spot I 
like best in all this great city. The theatres 
with all their noises ; Covent Garden, dearer to 
me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are 
morally sure of the earliest peas and 'sparagus ; 
Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, 
within a few yards of us. Mary had not been 
here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a 
thief. She sits at the window working ; and, 
casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a 
concourse of people coming this way, with a 
constable to conduct the ceremony. These 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 8i 



little incidents agreeably diversify a female 
life." 

Besides these novel sights, they found 
strange sounds in their new abode. A bra- 
zier's hammers were rankling all day long 
within, and by night without — but let Mary 
tell it, in her letter to Dorothy Wordsworth : 
'* Here we are living at a brazier's shop. No. 
20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden — a place 
all alive with noise and bustle ; Drury Lane 
Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent 
Garden from our back windows. . . . The 
hubbub of the carriages returning from the 
play doesn't annoy me in the least — strange 
that it doesn't,* for it is quite tremendous. I 
quite enjoy looking out of the window, and 
listening to the calling up of the carriages, 
and the squabbles of the coachmen and link- 
boys." 

They squabble still of a foggy night — " a real 
London partic'ler " — and the noise is even 
greater now than it was then, and Covent 
Garden is filthier than ever, and the thieves 
go by escorted by a '' bobby," and attended 
by a crowd ; but the brazier no longer brazes, 



S2 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



and his discordant shop is now inoffensive 
with noiseless fruits. 

Here they lived until 1823, these six years 
filled with increasing prosperity, with compara- 
tive comfort, with happy friendships, with his 
best work, with sudden fame. His income had 
slowly increased with each added year of 
service in the East India House, and the earn- 
ings of his literary work swelled it slightly. 
That work had never yet received its recogni- 
tion. It was collected and published in two 
handsome volumes in 1818, and the reading 
world of that day suddenly awakened to see 
in the obscure clerk, plodding daily to his desk 
in Leadenhall Street, its most delicate humour- 
ist, its most acute critic, its most perfect essay- 
ist. A little later, inspired by this success, he 
set to work in these rooms in Russell Street 
on his " Elia" papers, begun in the new London 
Magazine for August, 1820. 

So he outgrew his gloom and grew gayer, 
although he was never for one hour out of the 
shadow of Mary's constant imminent danger of 
a relapse. He drew around him many new 
acquaintances, especially the theatrical folk of 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 83 



this quarter, and more and more of the " friendly 
harpies " he was fond of, on whom he spent his 
time and squandered his strength. He needed 
all he could save of time and strength for his 
evening work on his Essays, after his day's 
work at his desk. Yet he not only was not 
allowed to attend to literary labour, but he 
complained that he could not even write let- 
ters at home, because he was never alone ; and 
had to seize odd moments for all such writ- 
ing at his of^ce and from his work in East 
India House. Stationery, too, he seized there; 
and some of his unapproachable letters were 
written on printed ofificial forms concerning 
" statements of the weights and amounts of 
the following lots"! His task-masters there 
would have gone out of their mercantile minds 
could they have made accurate estimates of 
the hard money value to be put by posterity 
on those "following lots" which he thus un- 
ofHcially filled in ! 

Even there he was not unmolested, but was 
constantly " called off to do the deposits on 
cotton wool," he complained when writing to 
Wordsworth. " But why do I relate this to 



84 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



you, who want faculties to comprehend the 
great mystery of deposits, of interest, of ware- 
house rent, and of contingent fund?" 

So his growing need and his growing want 
to be alone were never gratified. *' Except 
my morning's walk to the office, which is like 
treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am 
never so — I cannot walk home from office but 
some officious friend offers his unwelcome cour- 
tesies to accompany me. All the morning I 
am pestered — evening company I should always 
like, had I any mornings, but I am saturated 
with human faces {divine^ forsooth) and voices 
all the golden morning. ... I am never 
C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He who thought 
it not good for man to be alone, preserve me 
from the more prodigious monstrosity of being 
never by myself." He could not even eat in 
peace, for his familiars were with him putting 
questions — presumably inopportune questions 
— asking his opinions, and interrupting him in 
every way. " Up I go, mutton on table, hun- 
gry as a hunter, hope to forget nly cares, and 
bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mas- 
tication. Knock at the door ; in comes Mr. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 85 



Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gor- 
gon, or my brother, or somebody to prevent 
my eating alone — a process absolutely neces- 
sary to my poor, wretched digestion. Oh, the 
pleasure of eating alone ! — eating my dinner 
alone ! let me think of it." 

He did think of it, but to no practicable 
remedial end; for, if he hated to have the in- 
truders come, he hated still more to have them 
go ; and he had to avow, '^ God bless 'em ! 
I love some of 'em dearly ! " 

All this was a ceaseless drain on his vitality, 
and a ceaseless strain on the nerves already so 
overstrung. He wondered how " some people 
keep their nerves so nicely balanced as they 
do, or have they any ? or are they made of 
pack-thread? He" (I know not of whom he 
spoke) " is proof against weather, ingratitude, 
meat underdone, every weapon of fate." Lamb 
was not proof against good friends, his sympa- 
thetic nature going out perpetually to them 
to his own loss. Of Coleridge he said : " The 
neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as 
the presence of fifty ordinary persons. . . . 
If I lived with him, or with the author of ' The 



86 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Excursion,' I should in a very little time lose 
my own identity." Only those of his suscep- 
tible temperament can comprehend this con- 
fession, or his characteristic commendation of 
John Rickman, Clerk of the House of Com- 
mons, a newly made and highly valued friend : 
" He understands you the first time. Voti need 
never twice speak to himy 

Such were the tremulous nerves which 
seemed to need the stimulus of alcohol, and 
which were so easily swayed and upset by it. 
The lachrymose and dolorous tones of Re- 
spectability are forever croaking loud in lam- 
entation that Lamb was a Drunkard. It is 
not true. He was no drunkard. He could 
not have been a drunkard with his delicate 
organization. I believe that he suffered, un- 
knowingly withal, from the malady now named 
nervous dyspepsia ; to which he was a vic- 
tim, partly by inheritance, largely by his 
own indiscretions. He was careless in his 
habits, in his diet, in his exercise — walking 
often at unfitting hours and for excessive 
hours — and he had no regard at all for any 
sort of proper precautions. Although habitu- 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 87 



ally given to plain fare, and no gormandizer, 
he was at times fond of outrageous dishes, and 
fearless in his appalling experiments on his di- 
gestive machinery. He audaciously claimed for 
himself the stomach of Heliogabalus ! Like 
Thackeray, he had the courage of his gastro- 
nomic convictions, and he has left an imperish- 
able record of his love for roast pig, cow-heel, 
and brawn. '* I am no Quaker at my food — I 
confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it. 
. . . I hate a man who swallows it, affect- 
ing not to know what he is eating ; I suspect 
his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinc- 
tively from one who professes to like minced 

veal " — admirable appreciation ! ** C holds 

that a man cannot have a pure mind who re- 
fuses apple-dumplings — I am not sure but he is 
right." And about a pig, just then roasting, he 
wrote to Wordsworth : " How beautiful and 
strong those buttered onions come to my 
nose ! " He could snatch a fearful joy even 
from that baleful refection, cold brawn ; and 
only at the thought thereof, as he is writing, he 
glows with esurient unction. " 'Tis, of all my 
hobbies, the supreme in the eating way. . . . 



88 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



It is like a picture of one of the old Italian 
masters ; its gusto is of that hidden sort." 

Conscientious in his cultivation of these ad- 
mirably abnormal appetites ; fond of heavy, late 
suppers ; addicted to too much tobacco ; with 
friends forever to the fore to interest, stimulate, 
and thus unnerve him ; and with the unceasing 
terror that hung over their home and gave it 
its profound depression, it is small wonder 
that he found in alcohol just what he needed, 
and just what he should not have depended 
upon ! He would tipple at times, and now and 
then he did get drunk, I do not deny ; but 
never twice in the same house, as he truthfully 
assured a lady ! That was a redeeming habit, 
surely. The fact, put in a word, is that he was 
affected by incredibly small quantities of stimu- 
lants, and as high as they pulled up his spirits, 
even so correspondingly low did his spirits sink 
afterward. His agonies of remorse, following a 
slight excess, were morbid, fantastic, never to 
be taken as true to the letter. After a trifling 
tipsy quarrel with Walter Wilson, he sent an 
apology, and added : " You knew well enough 
before that a very little liquor will cause a con- 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 89 



siderable alteration in me." Mary wrote fre- 
quently : " He came home very smoky and 
drinky last night ; " and then he would re- 
proach himself the day after for '■' wasting and 
teasing her life for five years past incessantly 
with my cursed drinking and ways of going 
on." His spasmodic efforts at reform were 
born of these extravagant self-accusings, and 
were equally needless and fruitless. " I am 
afraid I must leave off drinking. I am a poor 
creature, but I am leaving off gin." And he 
did leave it off, with a moral certainty of his 
abstinence lasting until his feeble stomach 
clamoured for so much porter in its place that 
Mary herself had to beg him '^ to live like him- 
self once more." 

His " Farewell to Tobacco " was more suc- 
cessful, and more permanent ; it was not only 
'' his sweet enemy," but really his worst enemy. 
" Liquor and company and wicked tobacco, 
o' nights, have quite dis-pericraniated me, as 
one may say;" and of these three delights 
wicked tobacco was to him the most delightful, 
and withal the most dangerous. And so we 
must not consider too curiously his famous 



90 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



*' Confessions of a Drunkard," with its terrible, 
eloquent passage, beginning with this unfair 
and unfounded introspection : '' To be an ob- 
ject of compassion to friends, of derision to 
foes ; to be suspected by strangers, stared at 
by fools." We are glad and proud to take him 
as we find him — full of frailties, just as we 
poorer mortals are ; it is not for us to sit in 
judgment on him ; we say to the Philistines, 
in Wordsworth's benignant words, ^' Love him 
or leave him alone." 

It was during the latter period of their resi- 
dence in the Temple, and during their six years 
in Russell Street, that Lamb produced the 
greater part of the work he has left — small in 
sum but great in achievement. It is not the 
province of this study to dwell on his various 
literary performances, but it comes within my 
scope to speak of his sister's assistance in that 
literary labour. In all matters* he depended 
greatly upon her. " She is older and wiser and 
better than I, and all my wretched imperfec- 
tions I cover to myself by resolutely thinking 
on her goodness." During each frequent re- 
currence of her pitiful craze — when she was 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 91 



forced to be '* from home," as he lovingly and 
tenderly phrased it — he was lost and helpless. 
*' I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and 
I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I 
dare not think, lest I should think wrong, so 
used am I to look up to her in the least as in 
the biggest perplexity." 

He did not overrate her. She was no com- 
monplace creature, and she impressed all who 
knew her well as a woman of fine judgment, 
of noteworthy good sense, full of womanly 
sympathies, sweet and serene. Hazlitt com- 
mended her as the wisest and most rational 
woman he had ever known. With strangers 
she was unpretentious, mild of manner, reticent 
rather than loquacious. In her bearing towards 
her brother she was gentle and gracious always, 
and she had a way of letting her eyes follow 
him everywhere about the room, in company. 
When looking directly at him she had often an 
upward, pleading, peculiar regard. Mrs. Anne 
Gilchrist, in her admirable m^onograph, has 
called attention to the rare tact — excellent 
thing in woman ! — shown by Mary in dealing 
with her brother's caprices and foibles, all 



92 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



through his hfe. Indeed, there was absolute 
inspiration in her way of looking at, and acting 
upon, these matters. It seemed to her to be a 
vexatious kind of tyranny, which women use 
towards men, just because the women have 
better judgment — the italics are her own ! She 
pours forth profuse strains of unpremeditated 
wisdom, in this same letter to Sarah Stoddart : 
'* Let tnen alone, and at last we find they come 
around to the right way, which we, by a kind 
of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far 
better that we should let them often do wrong, 
than that they should have the torment of a 
monitor always at their elbows." Guided by 
such priceless principles, it is no wonder that 
she succeeded in never crossing that thin line 
which divides the domain of the judicious ad- 
viser, the opportune helper, from that of the 
untimely, incessant, ineffective Nagger. She 
once said, *' Our love for each other has been, 
the torment of our lives " — torment and as- 
suagement together, as we know, and made 
sweet mainly by her simple sagacity. 

Regarding her personal appearance, Barry 
Cornwall has told us that ** her face was pale. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 93 



and somewhat square, very placid, with gray 
intelligent eyes;" and De Quincey called her 
" that Madonna-like lady." Her smile was as 
winning as Charles's own, and when she spoke, 
there came a slight catch in her soft voice, un- 
conscious sisterly reflex of his stammer. She 
was below the medium stature, strongly and 
somewhat squarely built. 

To this slight sketch of her looks and bear- 
ing may be added these, not too trivial fond 
records, of her manner of dressing. Her gown 
was usually plain, of black stuff or silk ; but, 
on festive occasions, she came out in a dove- 
coloured silk, with a kerchief of snow-white 
muslin folded across her bosom. She wore a 
cap of the kind in fashion in her youth, its 
border deeply frilled, and a bow on the top. 

I cannot finish more fitly than with Barry 
Cornwall's dainty touch, about her habit of 
snuff-taking, in common with Charles : " She 
had a small, white, delicately formed hand, and, 
as it hovered above the tortoise-shell snuff-box, 
the act seemed another link of association 
between the brother and sister, as they sat over 
their favourite books." 



94 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



These favourite books were almost all the 
same, chiefly the Elizabethan dramatists, not- 
ably Shakespeare ; but, unlike Charles — " nar- 
rative teases ;;^^," he owned — she was fond of 
modern romance and read many novels. " She 
must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently 
told — so there be life stirring in it," Elia wrote 
of Bridget, in his subtle portraiture of her in 
" Mackery End." Otherwise their intellectual 
tastes were in entire accord ; and she was but 
a little behind him in having almost a tinge of 
genius in her keen critical faculty. She came 
naturally to a happy command of pure limpid 
English, which gave to her style the charm of 
her own personal flavour. This flavour was 
made the more racy by a delicate humour, 
exceptional in her sex. 

These genuine literary qualities first had a 
chance to show themselves in the year 1806, 
while they were living in the Temple. Charles 
writes : " Mary is doing for Godwin's book- 
seller twenty of Shakspeare's plays, to be 
made into children's tales. ... I have 
done ' Othello ' and ' Macbeth,' and mean to do 
all the tragedies. I think it will be popular 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 95 



among the Httle people, besides money. It's 
to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done 
them capitally, I think you'd think." And 
again: '* Mary is just stuck fast in ' All's Well 
that Ends Well.' She complains of having to 
set forth so many female characters in boy's 
clothes. She begins to think Shakspeare 
must have wanted — imagination ! " And she, 
too, has left a pretty picture of their com- 
mon work: ''You would like to see us, as we 
often sit writing on one table (but not on 
one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena, 
in the ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' or, rather, 
like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking 
snuff, and he groaning all the while, and saying 
he can make nothing of it, which he always 
says till he has finished, and then he finds 
out he has made something of it." 

She certainly had the more difficult task 
in dealing with the comedies, and it was she 
who wrote the greater part of the preface, an 
admirable piece of musical English, ending thus: 
*' . . . pretending to no other merit than 
as faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespear's 
matchless imagination, whose plays are strength- 



g6 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



eners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish 
and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all honour- 
able thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy., 
benignity, generosity, humanity." The little 
book — " Tales from Shakespear, Designed for 
the Use of Young Persons, Embellished with 
Copper-plates," (by Mulready) — came out in 
1807, and was such a sudden and assured suc- 
cess with older persons as well, that a second 
edition was soon called for. Frequent editions 
are still in demand. The new preface stated 
that, though the tales had been meant for 
children, '' they were found adapted better for 
an acceptable and improving present to young 
ladies advancing to the state of womanhood." 
She also did the larger share of " Mrs. Leices- 
ter's School " — a collection of charm.ing tales 
for children, over some of which Coleridge used 
to gush, and Landor roar in admiration, in his 
best Boythorn manner. A volume of " Poetry 
for Children, by the Author of ' Mrs. Leicester's 
School,' " was published later. After this her 
literary productions consisted only of occa- 
sional magazine articles, to one of which, " On 
Needle-Work," I have already referred. 



^,s 






»■/ ^ ;;//.^ /; .. 




THE COTTAGE IN COLEBROOK ROW. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 97 



For the stories in prose, their authoress found 
the local scenery and colour in her memories 
of her youthful visits to Mackery End and to 
Blakesware. Indeed, the stories are supposed 
to be told to each other by the young ladies in 
a school at Amwell — the rural village which 
slopes up from the Lea and the New River, 
only one mile from Ware. 

At intervals during these years, there had 
been short excursions out of town, longer 
country trips, and journeys to visit friends far 
from London. Charles had spent a fortnight 
at Nether Stowey with Coleridge, in the summer 
of 1797, and there had made the acquaintance 
of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. 
She was, of all women he had known, Coleridge 
said, " the truest, most inevitable and, at the 
same time, the quickest and readiest in sym- 
pathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter 
or with tears, with the realities of life, or the 
larger realities of the poets." She formed a 
warm friendship for Mary, and, like her, she had 
clouds come over her reason, though not till 
very late in life. 

During another vacation, Lamb spent a few 
7 



98 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



days with Hazlitt in Wiltshire, and in other 
summer holidays he visited Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, He bore the country always very 
bravely for the sake of the friends with whom 
he was staying. 

He had taken Mary to Margate in early years 
— or, maybe, she took him, for she was then 
twenty-six and he only fifteen — and he has told 
us, in ''The Old Margate Hoy," of this their 
first seaside experience, and how many things 
combined to make it the most agreeable holi- 
day of his life. Neither of them had ever seen 
the sea, then, and had never been so long to- 
gether alone and from home. Many years after, 
during his holidays, they went together again 
to the seaside at Brighton and at Hastings. In 
1802, he was seized with a strong desire to go 
to remote regions, and hurried Mary off for a 
stay with Coleridge at the Lakes. There they 
passed three delightful weeks, although not in 
the fairy-land which their first sunset made 
them think they had come into. 

Then they had a *' dear, quiet, lazy, delicious 
month " with the Hazlitts, at Winterslow, near 
Salisbury, in 1809. This visit, but not its pleas- 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 99 



ure, they repeated in the following year; and 
journeyed from there to Oxford, Hazlitt ac- 
companying them, and adding to their delight 
in the noble university town, and in the Blen- 
heim pictures. 

This trip, like most of their trips, was dearly 
paid for by Mary's illness. The fatigues, the 
changes, and the reaction after the excitement 
of society, disturbed her accustomed balance, 
nearly always ; sometimes even before they 
reached home. So surely was this foreseen that 
she used to pack a strait waistcoat among her 
effects, on starting on any journey, however 
short. Her most distressing attack occurred on 
their way to Paris ; a tour taken with needless 
rashness in the summer of 1822. She was seized 
with her mania in the diligence, not far from 
Amiens, and had to be left there in charge of 
the nurse, whom they had taken with them for 
just this emergency. It pleases us to learn 
that the friend who met and helped them there 
was an American, John Howard Payne. He 
escorted Mary to Paris, when she was fit to 
travel, two months later. There Crabb Robin- 
son met them, and says : '* Her only male 



100 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



friend is a Mr. Payne, whom she praises ex- 
ceedingly for his kindness and attention to 
Charles. He is the author of ' Brutus,' and 
has a good face." 

In the following year, the Lambs were able 
to make partial requital for Payne's good ser- 
vices then, by helping him in his attempts to 
produce his plays and adaptations on the 
London and Paris boards. 

With but a short holiday before him, and 
friends awaiting him at Versailles, Charles had 
gone on from Amiens as soon as he could be 
spared ; and had to leave Paris before Mary's 
arrival. She found there a characteristic note 
from him for her guidance. After pointing out 
a few pictures in the Louvre for her scrutiny — 
he had a pretty taste in painting as well as in 
engraving — he told her : " You must walk all 
along the borough side of the Seine, facing 
the Tuileries. There is a mile and a half of 
print-shops and book-stalls. If the latter were 
but English ! Then there is a place where 
Paris people put all their dead people, and 
bring them flowers and dolls and gingerbread 
nuts and sonnets, and such trifles. And that 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. loi 



is all, I think, worth seeing as sights, except that 
the streets and shops of Paris are themselves 
the best sight." This was about all — these 
sights, the folios he loved, the fricasseed frogs 
he learned to love, and his meeting with Talma 
— that he brought away from Paris. Nor has 
he left any record of his visit, or of its impres- 
sions on him, such as we should have cherished. 



V. 



** When you come Londonward you will find 
me no longer in Covent Garden ; I have a cot- 
tage in Colebrook Row, Islington ; a cottage, 
for it is detached ; a white house with six good 
rooms ; the New River (rather elderly by this 
time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be 
so termed) close to the foot of the house ; and 
behind is a spacious garden with vines (I assure 
you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, car- 
rots, cabbages, to dehght the heart of old Al- 
cinous." Thus Lamb wrote on September 2, 
1823, to Bernard Barton. 

As early as in 1806, while living in Mitre 
Court Buildings, and anxious to finish his farce. 
Lamb had hired a room outside the Temple. 
Here he could work in quiet, free from his noc- 
turnal visitors — knock-eternal, he called them, 
in one of his poorest puns. He had tried the 
same experiment in Russell Street, and when 
that refuge failed to secure privacy, he and 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 103 



Mary used to slip away for a few days at a time 
to furnished lodgings at Dalston. But all these 
strategic devices brought only double discom- 
fort, and they finally resolved to go away from 
town altogether. Also they thought that they 
would like to have a whole house of their own, 
ail to themselves. Thus it came that the letter 
quoted above was written. To that new home 
I now invite you to go with me. 

As v/e turn from the City Road into Cole- 
brook Row, we find an almost country road to- 
day, broad, tree-lined, a strip of grass running 
down its middle, and bordered by large, old- 
fashioned houses. Beneath it flows that same 
New River to its reservoir near Sadler's Wells, 
hard by. From the top of the hill we catch a 
glimpse on either hand of the Regent's Canal, 
as it comes out from the tunnel underneath; 
through the mouth of which wheezes and 
jangles laboriously the round-topped tug, with 
its chain of canal-boats. It is a pleasant ap- 
proach to " Elia " — as the present owner has 
re-christened No. 19 Colebrook Row — for the 
many pilgrims from all over the English-speak- 
ing world to whom it has become a shrine. 



104 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



For these walls hold more memories of the 
brother and sister than do any of the spots we 
have yet seen. It stands nearly as when they 
lived in and left it, though no longer detached ; 
a simple cottage of two stories and an attic, 
with stone steps mounting sideways. Its tiny 
front garden, flagged and flower-filled, is fenced 
off discreetly from the road, a Virginia creeper 
climbing over the railings. 

The New River before it has been sodded 
over, and even the wool-gathering George 
Dyer, with his head in the clouds, could not 
tumble into it now. That was one of the most 
madly ludicrous scenes ever conceived, and was 
thus described by Lamb: '^ I do not know 
when I have experienced a stranger sensation 
than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had 
been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays 
back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking 
leave, instead of turning down the right-hand 
path, by which he had entered, with staff in 
hand and at noon-day, deliberately march right 
forwards into the midst of the stream that runs 
by U3, and totally disappear." B. W. Procter 
(Barry Cornwall) happened to call soon after 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 105 



and " met Miss Lamb in the passage, in a state 
of great alarm — she was whimpering, and could 
only utter, ' Poor Mr. Dyer ! poor Mr. Dyer ! ' 
in tremulous tones. I went upstairs aghast, 
and found that the involuntary diver had 
been placed in bed, and that Miss Lamb had 
administered brandy and water as a well-estab- 
lished preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccus- 
tomed to anything stronger than the ' crystal 
spring,' was sitting upright in bed, perfectly 
delirious. His hair had been rubbed up, and 
stood up like so many needles of iron-gray. 
He did not (like Falstaff) ' babble o' green 
fields,' but of the ' watery Neptune.' ' I soon 
found out where I was,' he cried to me, laugh- 
ing ; and then he went wandering on, his words 
taking flight into regions where no one could 
follow." 

The *' cheerful dining-room, all studded over, 
and rough, with old books," is level with the 
front garden, and unchanged except that its 
several windows have now been cut into one 
large one : as also has been done above, in the 
" lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full 
of choice prints." The prints and the old 



io6 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



books are gone, and rigid rows of decorous 
volumes stare stonily from their shelves ; grim 
horsehair chairs refuse the aforetime free and 
unforced invitation; and the stuffed corpses 
of dead birds, and other framed horrors of the 
period all about, strike terror to our souls. 
Against the wall, rears itself rigourously a prim 
piano, from which he would have fled aghast ; 
for, in her goodness, nature had given him no 
taste for music, and he never had to pretend to 
care for it. He was constitutionally susceptible 
of noises, and a carpenter's hammer, in a warm 
summer noon, would fret him into more than 
midsummer madness ; but these single strokes 
brought no such anguish to his ear as did the 
** measured malice of music." He affirmed that 
he had been goaded to rush out from the Opera, 
in sheer pain, seeking solace in street sounds ! 

However disfurnished may be this interior, its 
tiny hall, its narrow stairway, its walls — on which 
the Lambs may have put this very same queer 
marbled paper — all are in the same state as then, 
when they lived within and loved them. The 
most marked alteration has been in his once 
" spacious garden " — around which he challenged 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 107 



that professional jester, the obese, red-nosed 
Theodore Hook, to race him for a wager. That 
diminutive domain has dwindled now to an 
exiguous back yard, and a soda-water factory 
is built over its vines and vegetables. 

Here the little household was enlarged and 
enlivened by the presence of Emma Isola, the 
orphaned grandchild of an Italian exile, who 
taught his own tongue in Cambridge, and who 
had been the Italian teacher of Gray and of 
Wordsworth. To her the Lambs, then visiting 
Cambridge, took a strong fancy; Mary especially 
pouring out on her the bounteous sympathy 
with which she flowed over for young people, 
and which won from all of them an equal fond- 
ness. They invited the lonely girl to visit them 
during her holidays, and finally they made her 
their adopted daughter, and their home her 
own. Mary helped her with French, Charles 
taught her Latin, that she might become a 
governess. Lamb was always quick to serve 
those who were poorer than himself, and, giving 
greatly all his life long, in Procter's words, he 
always had proteges and pensioners on his 
bounty. Yet he was curiously provident, and 



io8 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



never lived beyond his simple income, never 
ran into debt. He could and did practise 
economy with himself, but he was incapable of 
parsimony in his dealings with others. 

These are De Quincey's words about this 
side of the man : " Many liberal people I have 
known in this world . . . many munificent 
people, but never any one upon whom, for 
bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for 
charitable construction of doubtful or mixed 
actions, and for regal munificence, you might 
have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance 
as upon this comparatively poor Charles Lamb." 

But of all this the subject of this fervent, 
true tribute tells us no word. He prattled in 
print as freely and as frankly as Montaigne, 
though with none of the sentimental shame- 
lessness of Jean Jacques Rousseau ; and his 
delightful egotism has made plain to us his 
foibles and his follies. Yet, with all the rest 
of his life in evidence, we know nothing from 
/iim of 

"That best portion of a good man's life, 
His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love." 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 109 



They had need, just then, of the brightness 
of the young girl's presence, for they were 
saddened — albeit needlessly so for all the com- 
fort he had brought to them — by the death of 
their brother John. Mary's illnesses were grow- 
ing more frequent and more prolonged ; and 
Charles was chafing more and more under his 
unending drudgery at the desk. In 1822 he 
had already written to Wordsworth : " I grow 
ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty 
years have I served the Philistines, and my 
neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't 
know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of 
four pent walls, without relief, day after day, 
all the golden hours of the day between ten 
and four, without ease or interposition." And 
once he gave irate vent to a great outburst, 
dear to all but to the shop-keeping soul : " Con- 
fusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traf- 
fic, exchange of commodities, intercourse be- 
tween nations, all the consequent civilization, 
and wealth, and amity, and links of society, and 
getting rid of prejudices, and getting a knowl- 
edge of the face of the globe ; and rotting the 
very firs of the forest that look so romantic 



110 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



alive, and die into desks! Vale." And again: 
" Oh, that I were kicked out of Leadenhall, 
with every mark of indignity, and a competence 
in my fob ! The birds of the air would not be 
so free as I should. How I would prance and 
curvet it, and pick up cowslips and ramble 
about purposeless as an idiot ! " 

It was in April, 1825, that his wish was 
gratified, and his waiting brought to an end, in 
this very Colebrook cottage. He had nerved 
himself at length to offer his resignation to the 
Directors of the East India Company, and 
was surprised and delighted — having been kept 
a few weeks in suspense — by the proposal 
" that I should accept from the house, which 
I had served so well, a pension for life to 
the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed 
salary — a magnificent offer. I do not know 
what I answered between surprise and grati- 
tude, but it was understood that I accepted 
their proposal, and I was told that I was free 
from that hour to leave their service. I stam- 
mered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after 
eight I went home — forever." To Words- 
worth he wrote, on April 6, 1825 : ^' I came 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. I'l i 



home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The 
incomprehensibleness of my condition over- 
whelmed me ; it was like passing from life into 
eternity. Every year to be as long as three — 
to have three times as much real time — time 
that is m}^ own — in it ! " 

He compared his sensations to those of 
Leigh Hunt on being released from prison. 
Indeed, the change proved to be too sudden 
and too great for his happiness, and he yearned 
for the "pestilential clerk-faces" which had so 
long bored him : so one day, soon after, he 
went back to the office, and sat amid " the old 
desk companions, with whom I have had such 
merry hours," and tried to feel really sorry 
that he had left them in the lurch ! He has 
told us of all his feelings, good and bad, at this 
period, in " The Superannuated Man." He 
could not quite thoroughly enjoy his freedom, 
and was put to all sorts of devices to waste his 
cherished time ! He re-hung his Titians, his 
Da Vincis, his Hogarths, and his other beloved 
prints. He marshalled his Chelsea China shep- 
herds and shepherdesses in groups and singly 
all about the rooms. He rearranged the ragged 



112 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



veterans of his Hbrary ; not longing overmuch 
for the good leather that would comfortably 
clothe his shivering folios. Few of them were 
lettered on the back, and his reply to a silly 
somebody, who asked how he knew them, was: 
" How does a shepherd know his sheep?" It 
was his fantastic humour that, the better a 
book is the less it demands from binding ! 

Out of doors, he planted and pruned and 
grafted; and got into a row with an irascible 
old lady who owned the next garden. He sat 
under his own vine and contemplated the 
growth of vegetable nature. He explored his 
new neighbourhood, hunted up ancient hostel- 
ries, and made comparisons of their sundry and 
divers taps. He prowled about Bartholomew 
Fair, drinking in delight of its penny puppet- 
shows, and its other '' celebrated follies;-" as 
they had been contumeliously called by sedate 
John Evelyn, a visitor there nearly two cen- 
turies earlier. He took long walks into the 
country, with Tom Hood's erratic dog. Dash, 
who imposed outrageously on Lamb's good- 
nature ; and went on excursions with Mary, far- 
ther afield — notably to Enfield, where they 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 113 



made short stays with a Mrs. Leishman, into 
whose house they finally removed in 1827. 

'' I am settled for life, I hope, at Enfield. I 
have taken the prettiest compacted house I 
ever saw," he wrote. No health in Islington, 
was his complaint to Tom Hood ; and yet, 
'' 'twas with some pains that we were evulsed 
from Colebrook. You may find some of our 
flesh sticking to the door-posts. To change 
habitations is to die to them, and in my time 
I have died seven deaths." He hoped for 
benefit to Mary from the quiet, and to himself 
from the change, and yet he looked forward to 
casual trips to town, mainly '^ to breathe the 
fresher air of the metropolis." 

In those days they went to Enfield by coach 
twice a week or so, from one or another of the 
old inns, left standing to-day in Aldgate or 
Bishopsgate, No coaches run now, but it is a 
pleasant walk, up through the long northern 
suburb, still showing, spite of its being so citi- 
fied, traces of its old-time gentility in the 
square, stately, stolid brick mansions, the rural 
homes of rich city merchants a century since. 
We pass the High Cross at Tottenham, and 
8 



114 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



beside it the Swan Inn, descendant of that 
Swan in front of which, within sight of their 
beloved Lea, Anceps and Piscator rested " in a 
sweet, shady arbour which nature herself has 
woven with her own fine fingers : " but the 
stream is polluted now, and the arbour has 
gone, and Izaak Walton would not care for the 
new Swan. So we pass by Bruce Castle, thus 
named because it was owned by Robert Bruce, 
father of the Scotch king — now a boys' school 
— and come into that bit of road famous for 
John Gilpin's ride, and so on into Edmonton. 
Here we turn from the highway — by which the 
stage-coaches kept on northward to Ware and 
Hatfield — and going three miles farther, along 
the cross road, we reach Enfield. 

By rail it is ten miles from Liverpool Street 
Station, and we whisk there in forty minutes 
by many trains each day ; underground, behind 
houses, over their roofs ; along by Bethnal 
Green and Hackney Downs and London Fields 
— where now can be seen no green nor downs 
nor any fields — past Silver Street and Seven 
Sisters and White Hart Lane, and many such 
prettily named places; and last of all through 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 115 



a stretch of real country into the dapper little 
station of Enfield. 

" Enfield Chase " was a favourite hunting- 
ground of royalty until it was divided into par- 
cels and sold after the execution of Charles I. 
Some of the old hunting-lodges still stand in 
gardens, one of them once tenanted by William 
Pitt. I have talked with aged men in the vil- 
lage who have seen, when they were boys, the 
''King's red deer" come into "The Chase" 
to drink from the New River: which winds 
through the land here, its waters drawn from 
the springs of Amwell and Chadwell, and from 
slopes with sunshine on them, and led later 
underground through pipes to supply London 
town. This new river was cut and engineered 
by Mr. Hugh Myddelton, citizen and goldsmith, 
who, " with his choice men of art and painful 
labourers set roundly to this business," in the 
year of grace 1609, and was knighted by the 
first James for his enterprise and success in 
his stupendous work. Tom Hood got out 
" Walton Redivivus, a New River Eclogue," 
and Lamb wrote a preface for it, in which he 
referred to his new home having the same 



ii6 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



neighbour as his cottage at Colebrook. Doubt- 
less he recalled, too, his out-of-town bathing- 
excursions with the other boys at Christ's, and 
how they would wanton like young dace in this 
same stream. '' My old New River has pre- 
sented no extraordinary novelties lately. But 
there Hope sits, day after day, speculating on 
traditionary gudgeons. I think she hath taken 
the fisheries. I now know the reason why our 
forefathers were denominated the East and 
West Angles." 

We pass the town's old inns, with steep- 
sloping roofs, and many a stately mansion set in 
great gardens ; among them the ancient manor- 
house, renovated by Edward VI. for the resi- 
dence of his sister, the Princess Elizabeth. 
From here she wrote letters which you may see 
in the British Museum ; and in the Bodleian at 
Oxford is the MS. translation, in her own hand, 
of an Italian sermon preached here by Occhini. 
This building — now The Palace School — con- 
tains one of her rooms, oak-panelled and richly 
ceilinged ; and in the grounds is a noble cedar 
of Lebanon, planted in 1670. We look up at 
the swinging signs of the Rising Sun and the 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 117 



CrowJt and Horseshoes, past all of which 
Lamb often went, and, doubtless, too often 
did not get past without going in. It tickled 
him to urge truly proper people to tipple 
with him in these two taverns ; and even 
lady-like Miss Kelly — the actress with the 
" divine, plain face " — -and the austere Words- 
worth were enticed to enter, and persuaded 
to have " a pull at the pewter ! " 

And so, through a leafy lane bordered by 
stately elms, with cosey cottages on either 
hand, across a cheerful green, alongside the 
rippling stream, we reach the " Manse," as 
Lamb's home was called for many years — a 
name it has only lately lost, when it was newly 
stuccoed and painted. It has been rechristened 
"The Poplars," from the four tall trees of 
that species which rear themselves in its front 
garden. In the garden behind, the old yew 
and the bent apple-trees, and beyond the pleas- 
ant fields stretching away, are all as they were 
when he looked through and over them to the 
Epping Hills. The house has been enlarged 
and changes have been made inside, and all is 
hideously and shamelessly "■ smart." 



1 18 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Nothing in this interior speaks to us of its 
old tenants. They were seen, on their coming 
to take the house, by a schoolboy next door, 
who has given this pleasing description of 
them : " Leaning idly out of a window, I saw 
a group of three issuing from the ' gambogy- 
looking cottage ' close at hand — a slim, middle- 
aged man in quaint, uncontemoorary habili- 
ments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old 
lady, in a bonnet like a mob-cap, and a young 
girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog 
[Hood's immortal ' Dash '], holding a board, 
with ' This House To Let ' on it, in his jaws: 
Lamb was on his way back to the house- 
agent's, and that was his fashion of announc- 
ing that he had taken the premises." 

In the summer of 1829, the family of three 
left this home, the care of which was wearing 
too heavily on Mary. '' We have taken a fare- 
well of the pompous, troublesome trifle called 
housekeeping, and are settled down into poor 
boarders and lodgers, at next door, with an old 
couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. 
. . . Our providers are an honest pair, 
Dame Westwood and her husband ; he, when 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 1 19 



the light of prosperity shined on them, a mod- 
erately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, 
retired since with something under a compe- 
tence . . . and has one anecdote^ upon which, 
and about ^40 a year, he seems to have retired 
in green old age." It was " forty-two inches 
nearer town," Lamb wrote, and it still is 
there, next door to their first Enfield home, 
as you see it in our cut : a comfortable cottage 
set back from the road, vines clambering over 
its small entrance-porch and hiding all the 
walls. In its little back sitting-room were 
written the " Last Essays of Elia." In this 
house he remained for almost four years, and 
in 1833 he made his last remove — except the 
final one we all must make — to Edmonton. 



VL 



These years at Enfield were not happy years. 
They were both getting old ; Mary's malady was 
growing on her, taking her more frequently 
front home ; and even the visits of their child, 
Emma Isola — she was now a governess — miti- 
gated his loneliness but slightly. His removal 
to the country had left his friends a long way 
behind, and, for all his urging, they could not 
come often so far afield for informal calls. 
"We see scarce anybody," he laments. Haz- 
litt and Hood and Hunt came occasionally; 
faithful Martin Burney fetched forth his new- 
est whim for their amusement ; and loyal 
Crabb Robinson often walked out to take 
tea or to play whist, or for a stroll in the 
fields with Charles. Once, as he has recorded 
in his " Diary," he brought the mighty Wal- 
ter Savage Landor for a call : " We had 
scarcely an hour to chat with them, but it 
was enough to make both Landor and Worsley 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 121 



express themselves delighted with the person 
of Mary Lamb, and pleased with the conversa- 
tion of Charles Lamb ; though I thought him 
by no means at his ease, and Miss Lamb was 
quite silent. Nothing in the conversation recol- 
lectable. Lamb gave Landor White's ' Fal- 
staff's Letters.' Emma Isola just showed her- 
self. Landor was pleased with her, and has 
since written verses on her." Only this once 
did Lamb and Landor come face to face. 

Lamb had always hated the country. '^ Let 
not the lying poets be believed, who entice 
men from the cheerful streets," he querulously 
complains ; and he asks, " What have I gained 
by health? Intolerable dulness. What by 
early hours and moderate meals ? A total 
blank. . . . Let no native Londoner im- 
agine that health and rest, innocent occu- 
pation, interchange of converse sweet, and 
recreative study, can make the country any- 
thing better than altogether odious and detest- 
able. A garden was the primitive prison, till 
man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, 
luckily sinned himself out of it." 

He was unable to read or write to any ex- 



122 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



tent in hot weather ; " what I can do, and do 
over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the 
days, these summer all-day days, with but 
a half-hour's candle-light, and no firelight." 
Sometimes, of a '' genial hot day," he would 
do his twenty miles and over. Once he took 
charge of a little school during the master's 
short absence ; and his first exercise of author- 
ity was to give the boys a holiday ! But 
nothing abated his boredom, and even in his 
bed he repined : " In dreams I am in Fleet 
Street, but I wake and cry to sleep again." 
And when he went to town, and sought in 
Fleet Street fresh sights and fresher air, he 
found no content : *' The streets, the shops, 
are left, but all old friends are gone. . . . 
Home have I none, and not a sympathizing 
house to turn to in the great city." 

He took lodgings for a while at No. 24 
Southampton Buildings, within sight of his 
former quarters at No. 34 of the same street 
— a house in which Hazlitt frequently had 
put up, not far from the house famed for his 
" ancillary affection ! " The numbers remain 
unchanged ; and you may look at the queer old 




NO. 34 SOUTHAMPTON BUILDINGS. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 123 



stuccoed front on any day you choose to turn 
out from Chancery Lane. The house has a 
strange, sloping roof of tiles, and altogether it 
is quite unlike any of its neighbours. 

But this impermanent residence in town 
brought no real relief, for he found that the 
bodies he cared for were in graves or dis- 
persed. He sought solace in work, and made 
extracts for Hone's Table Book from among 
the two thousand old plays left by Garrick to 
the British Museum. Hone had been grateful 
to Lamb for having contributed already to his 
Every Day Book; and had dedicated the issue 
for 1826 to him and to Mary. In doing so, 
he published his gratitude, most distastefully to 
them, saying in his preface that he could not 
forget "your and Miss Lamb's sympathy and 
kindness when glooms outmastered me ; and 
that your pen spontaneously sparkled in the 
book when my mind was in clouds and darkness. 
These ' trifles,' as each of you would call them, 
are benefits scored upon my heart." 

Forgiving this fulsome gush, Lamb set his 
pen. to sparkling again in the following year, 
and found relief in it. *' It is a sort of office- 



124 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



work to me — hours ten to four, the same. It 
does me good." The reading-room wherein he 
worked is now the print-room, a venerable and 
musty chamber, famous in those days for its 
fine specimens of the Pulex literarius, or Mu- 
seum flea ; and doubtless infested, too — for 
Lamb's irritation, as for Carlyle's, since the 
latter has left it on record — by that reader, 
still startling us there to-day, who blows his 
nose '' like a Chaldean trumpet in the new 
moon ; " and by that other, who slumbers 
peacefully with his head in a ponderous tome, 
and wakes suddenly, snorting. 

The assistant-librarian of the Museum at that 
time was the Reverend Mr. Cary — " the Dante 
man " — a friend of the Lambs of recent years ; 
and Charles found congenial companionship at 
his table, where he was frequently invited to 
dine. Near the Museum, in Hart Street, F. S. 
Cary, the son of the librarian, had his studio ; 
and there Charles would v/ander, on Thursdays, 
during the summer of 1834, and sit for his 
portrait, with Mary. He is portrayed seated 
in a chair, and Mary stands behind him ; the 
figures full length and half-life size. This 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 125 



painting was never completed, and from it the 
artist made a copy of Charles alone, after 
death. Of this, Crabb Robinson said, a few 
years later : " In no one respect a likeness ; 
thoroughly bad; complexion, figure, expres- 
sion unlike. But for ' Elia ' on a paper, I 
should not have thought it possible that it 
could have been meant for Charles Lamb." 
Another portrait of him had been painted in 
1805 by William Hazlitt ; his last work with 
the brush, we are told by his grandson. This 
figure, in the costume of a Venetian senator, 
is well known in its engravings, and is con- 
sidered an interesting presentation of the man. 
But, beyond the fine and forcible poise of 
the head — the noble head which resembled that 
of Bacon, said Leigh Hunt, except that it had 
less worldly vigour and more sensibility — this is 
to me an unpleasing picture. It robs Lamb of 
just that sensibility, and transforms him into a 
burly, truculent, ill-conditioned creature ! He 
was thirty years old at the time this was painted. 
When he was twenty-three, an admirable draw- 
ing in chalk had been made by Hancock; a 
profile likeness, in which the superb sweep of 



126 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



the cranial arch and the subtle sweet lines 
about the mouth are most noticeable. This, 
the first portrait known of him, was engraved 
on steel for Cottle's " Early Recollections of 
Coleridge." 

A striking piece of portraiture of his mature 
manhood has been found within a few years. 
It is a water-colour sketch by Mr. Joseph, 
A. R. A., and had been inserted, along with 
many other portraits, in a copy of Byron's 
*' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." This 
volume had been thus enlarged, in 1 8 19, by Mr. 
William Evans, Lamb's desk-companion in the 
East India House, and he had doubtless in- 
duced Lamb to sit for this portrait with this 
intent. Another admirable likeness was painted 
in oil, in 1827, by Henry Meyer, and this was 
engraved for the quarto edition of Leigh 
Hunt's " Lord Byron and his Contemporaries," 
published by Colburn, in 1828. 

The frontispiece of our volume is a repro- 
duction of the portrait first engraved for Tal- 
fourd's " Letters," published in 1837. It is 
known as the Wageman portrait, engraved by 
Finden, and is perhaps the most noted and 




'/ oiO- 



THE MACLISE PORTRAIT. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 127 



the most attractive of any likeness we have. 
Our Maclise portrait is made from an etching 
done by Daniel Maclise, R. A., for Eraser s 
Magazine ; in which pages it appeared, as one 
of '* A Gallery of Illustrious Literary Charac- 
ters," published from the year 1830 to 1838. 
Of all the portraits of Lamb, however, it was 
always held by those who had seen him that 
Brook Pulham's etching on copper was the 
most life-like in every way ever done. We are 
fortunate in having so many portraits, some of 
them so good; for Lamb never liked to sit, 
regarding the desire to pose for a picture as 
an avowal of personal vanity. 

Of serious literary work, during this period, 
Lamb did but little ; his main pen product 
being his letters to his many absent friends, 
which give us such valuable and characteristic 
glimpses into the man's lovable nature. He 
wrote a series of short essays, with the title 
'' Popular Fallacies," for the New Monthly Mag- 
azine in 1828; and a little prose miscellany — 
chat and souvenirs of the Royal Academy — 
called " Peter's Net," for the Englishman' s 
Magazine in 1831. The year before, Moxon 



128 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



had pubHshed a small volume of small poems 
by Lamb — "Album Verses " — concerning which 
a curious secret has only lately come to light. 
The critics found little to praise in these verses 
— and with good reason — and a review was sent 
to the Englishman s Magazine, with a line to 
Moxon from Lamb : " I have ingeniously con- 
trived to review myself. Tell me if this will 
do." He did not praise or puff his own work, 
let me hasten to say ; but his paper is rather a 
protest against the errors and carelessness of 
those same " indolent reviewers." Still, it is 
a clear case of surreptitious self-reviewing, and 
of it we may say, in the words of the coy 
Quakeress — not Lamb's Islington Quakeress — 
when she reluctantly consented to let her 
ardent wooer enforce his threat to kiss her — 
'' it must not be made a practice of." 

In 1833 appeared the " Last Essays of Elia," 
collected in one volume, from the London, the 
Englishman s, and the New Monthly Magazines, 
and the Athenceum, This work closed his lit- 
erary life, not long before the closing of his 
bodily life. 

For the scene darkens swiftly now. " Mary 







^^^s» 






K — . 

2 I 



r1 "« 



a 



u J2 



a. 



«^ 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 129 



is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. 
The last was three months, followed by two of 
depression most dreadful. I look back upon 
her earlier attacks with longing. Nice little 
durations of six weeks or so, followed by com- 
plete restoration, shocking as they were to me, 
then. In short, half her life is dead to me, and 
the other half is made anxious with fears and 
lookings-forward to the next shock." This was 
in May, 1833, when he decided to remove to 
Edmonton : " With such prospects it seemed 
to me necessary that she should no longer live 
with me, and be fluttered with continual re- 
movals ; so I am come to live with her at a Mr. 
Walden's and his wife, who take in patients, 
and have arranged to lodge and board us only." 
To lay a little more load on him, he lost 
Emma Isola, one month later, in July, 1833, by 
her marriage with Edward Moxon : their be- 
trothal having been entered into " with my per- 
fect approval and more than concurrence," he 
writes. In the same letter he says, as unsel- 
fishly as always : " I am about to lose my only 
walk companion, whose mirthful spirits were 
the youth of our house." He gave her, for a 
9 



130 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



marriage gift, his most cherished possession, 
a portrait of John Milton. Mary's reason was 
too clouded, at the time, to take interest in this 
affair, or even to understand it ; but on the day 
of the wedding, being at table with them all, 
Mrs. Walden proposed the health of Mr. and 
Mrs. Moxon. The utterance of the unwonted 
name restored Mary to her composedness of 
mind, as if by an electrical stroke ; she wrote 
afterward to the young couple : '' I never felt 
so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do 
now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my 
eyes, and all care from my heart." 

Amid all these added adversities, he tried, 
with his cheerful and cheering courage, to 
make the best of it all. He found compensa- 
tion in that they were '' emancipated from the 
Westwoods," and were settled '' three or four 
miles nearer the great city, coaches half-price 
less, and going always, of which I will avail 
myself. I have few friends left there, but one 
or two most beloved. But London streets 
and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not 
one known of the latter were remaining." 
And yet he struggled to town still more in- 







THE WALDEN HOUSE AT EDMONTON. 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 131 



frequently, and then only to find that, *' with 
all my native hankering after it, it is not what 
it was. . . . The streets and shops enter- 
taining as ever, else I feel as in a desert, 
and get me home to my care." It is a touch- 
ing sight, as we may picture it, that of the 
lonely man, with worn face and w^istful eyes, 
wandering forlornly up and down his once 
familiar streets, seeing so seldom any of the 
once familiar faces. One day he met Mrs. 
Shelley in the Strand, and was — she wrote to 
Leigh Hunt — very entertaining and amiable, 
though a little deaf. He asked her if they 
made puns in Italy, and told her that Captain 
Burney once made a pun in Otaheite, the first 
that was ever made in that country. The 
natives could not make out what he meant ; 
but all at once they discovered the pun, and 
danced round him in transports of joy ! 

During these lamentable days he saw his 
sister but seldom : '' Alas ! I too often hear 
her! . . . Her rambling chat is better to me 
than the sense and sanity of this world." That 
is to me the most tender and touching utterance 
in all the letters since letters were invented. 



132 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



At times, when her mind was not too turbid, 
she played piquet with him, and they talked of 
death ; which they did not fear, nor yet wish 
for. Neither had been ever quite able to say 
with Sir Thomas Browne, in Lamb's favourite 
*' Religio Medici " : "I thank God I have not 
those strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to 
the world, as to dote on life, or be convulsed and 
tremble at the name of death." Both wished 
that Mary should go first. Mrs. Cowden 
Clarke has told us how he said abruptly, one 
day — his blunt words covering his intense ten- 
derness — " You must die first, Mary." And 
she replied, with her little quiet nod and 
kindly smile : " Yes, I must die first, Charles! " 

Death was much in their thoughts during 
these days. Hazlitt had died in 1830, Lamb 
being with him at the last; and in July, 1834, 
Coleridge ended, after long suffering, a life of 
^' blighted utility," as he himself truly put it. 
The passing away of this dearest of the old 
familiar faces profoundly affected Lamb. " His 
great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot 
think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on 
men or books, without an ineffectual turning 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 133 



and reference to him." Nor did he linger long 
alone. One day, in the winter of that year, 
taking his customary walk, he stumbled, fell, 
and bruised his face. The wound did not seem 
serious, until erysipelas suddenly set in, and 
rapidly drained him of his insufficient vitality. 
So, on the 27th of December, 1834, the Fes- 
tival of St. John and the Eve of the Inno- 
cents, sank to sleep forever, in the fine words 
of Archbishop Leighton, " this sweet diffu- 
sive bountiful soul, desiring only to do good." 
He was happy in not living, as he had said 
long before, ^' after all the strength and beauty 
of existence is gone, when all the ' life of life 
is fled,' as poor Burns expresses it." 

It was a peaceful and painless ending, yet 
infinitely pitiful in its loneliness for one so 
essentially social in his life ; his sister's mind 
being too clouded to comprehend what was 
passing, and his only two friends who happened 
to be within reach — Talfourd and Crabb Rob- 
inson — arriving too late for his recognition. 
They heard him murmuring, with his faint 
voice, the names of his dear old companions. 
Only a few days before he had shown to a 



134 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



friend the mourning-ring left him by Cole- 
ridge, crying out, as he was wont to do, 
'* Coleridge is dead." And it had been but 
two weeks since, when, during a walk, he 
had pointed out to his sister the spot in 
the churchyard where he would like to lie. 

They laid him there, and she loved to walk 
to the grave of an evening, so long as she 
stayed in Edmonton. Indeed, she was with 
difficulty induced to go away for short visits 
to the Moxons and other friends. She was 
still at the Waldens in July, 1836, for an in- 
denture has been shown to me lately, of that 
date and of that place, by which she disposes 
of the copyright of the *' Tales from Shake- 
spear " and of " Mrs. Leicester's School." 
This document was witnessed by Edward 
Moxon and Frederick Walden. Her signature 
to it is in distinct and unshaken characters, and 
her middle name is written without the final e, 
thus, curiously enough, spelling it Ann ; for it 
was always elsewhere and by every one spelled 
Anne. 

Later, her lucid intervals becoming less fre- 
quent and less prolonged, and her malady grow- 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 135 



ing so nearly chronic that there was only " a 
twilight of consciousness in her," she was kept 
under care and restraint in St. John's Wood 
until her death, thirteen years after his. She 
rests by his side, in the same grave, as they 
both wished. His pension had been, with rare 
generosity, continued to her by the East India 
Company, and, in addition, she enjoyed the in- 
come of his small savings (i^2,ooo) during her 
life ; at her death it went to Emma Isola 
Moxon. This was the sum total of coin which 
he had gathered together ; his real riches were 
lavishly dispensed during his life, and are 
hoarded now by all of us who love his memory. 
We walk from Enfield by the same path 
across the fields through which Lamb escorted 
Wordsworth and his other visitors to the Bell 
at Edmonton, there to take a parting glass with 
them, before the return coach to town should 
come along. That famous inn is no longer as 
it was in his day, even then still in the same 
state as it was when Cowper laughed all night 
at the diverting history of John Gilpin, just 
heard from Lady Austen, and said that he 
'' must needs turn it into a ballad when he 



136 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



got up," to relieve his reaction of melancholy. 
The balcony from which the thrifty wife 
gazed on Johnny's mad career is gone, the 
very walls are levelled, a vilely vulgar gin- 
palace rises in their place, and the ancient 
sign, bearing the legend. The Bell and John 
Gilpms Ride, is now replaced by a great ag- 
gressive gilt emblem. 

From here we turn, following Lamb's last 
footsteps, perchance none too steady, along the 
London Road, past the old wooden taverns, 
steep-roofed and dormer-windowed, set well 
back from the highway, and on the green in 
front a mighty horse-trough — relic of ancient 
coaching conveniences. The Golden Fleece and 
the Horse and Groom are all unchanged ; 
in his odd irony the modern builder has left 
them untouched, because they have no his- 
toric memories ! Then we wind around under 
the railway arch, and so through dull, strag- 
gling Church Street ; passing the little shop 
in which — then a surgery — John Keats served 
his apprenticeship, and wrote his " Juvenile 
Poems ; " and by the one-storied Charity 
School, ''A structure of Hope, Founded in 




UtJllg \L i. i I iu liil il iLiBII.JlHL,. ,J,.!ll.i 4 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 137 



Faith, on the basis of Charity, 1784," as 
the legend reads over the head of the queer 
Httle female figure in the niche. Its mistress, 
drawn by Lamb's cheery voice as he came 
out, used to run to her window to look at 
the " spare, middle-sized man in pantaloons," 
as she described him. 

For Bay Cottage — so called in his day, now 
well re-named Lamb's Cottage, next to the 
rampant lions on the gate-posts of Lion House 
— stands nearly opposite the small school ; and 
it was through this long, narrow strip of front 
garden, cut by a gravelled footpath, and railed 
in by iron palings, that Charles Lamb walked 
for the last time, and was carried to his final 
resting-place. At its farther end squats the 
small cottage, darkened and made more diminu- 
tive by the projecting houses on both sides. 
On the left of the hall — large by contrast — is 
their snug sitting-room, not more than twelve 
feet square, low-ceilinged, deep-windowed, with 
a great beam above. Mounting by a narrow, 
winding, tiny staircase, with its Queen Anne 
balustrade — under which partly lies the dingy 
dining-room — we find ourselves in his front 



138 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



bedroom, his death-room, with one window 
only, as in the sitting-room beneath. Mary's 
large bedroom is behind, with two good win- 
dows, looking out on the long strip of back 
garden, wherein are aged trees and young vege- 
tables. Nothing within these walls has suf- 
fered any change. 

It is but two minutes' walk to the great, deso- 
late graveyard, encircling all about the ancient 
church ; whose square, squat, battlemented 
tower shows its mellow tints through dark 
masses of ivy. Service was going on when I 
went for the first time to this spot, a few years 
since, and I waited until the officiating clergy- 
man had finished his functions, that I might 
learn from him the location of the grave I had 
come so far to see. He could not tell me ! He 
had heard that Charles Lamb was buried in his 
churchyard, but he had never seen the grave, 
nor had he been unduly inquisitive about it. 
After we had found it, a crippled impostor, 
lounging on the lookout for stray pence, 
scrambled up with affectation of mute sym- 
pathy, and swarmed down with scissors on 
the long grass about the small mound. That 



Footprints of Charles Lamb. 139 



parson's ignorance, the obscurity and desola- 
tion of the grave, the shocking structure of 
the stone-mason order of architecture dominat- 
ing it, well-cared for, and aggressively commem- 
orating one " Gideon Rippon, of the Eagle 
House, Edmonton, and of the Bank of Eng- 
land " : all this is typical of the relation borne 
by literature to Genteel Society in England. 
Its combined cohorts of The Nobility, Clergy, 
and Gentry do not know, and do not want to 
know, about the burial-place of their only 
Charles Lamb ; but they do due reverence, 
with naive and unconscious vulgarity, to the 
memory of the bank official who kept Books or 
handled Money. Lamb himself, with his large 
sense of the ludicrous and his small sense of 
the decorous, would have been tickled by the 
harmony between this state of affairs and 
his whole life. To this grave — a peopled soli- 
tude it is to us — come pilgrims from the other 
side of the ocean, and sometimes the Blue-Coat 
boys in small groups. The dreary and tasteless 
head-stone bears Gary's feeble lines, affection- 
ate enough, no doubt ; but who cares to wade 
through a deluge of doggerel, to learn that 



140 Footprints of Charles Lamb. 



Lamb's '' meek and harmless mirth no more 
shall gladden our domestic hearth " ? The 
acutest criticism on this epitaph was made by 
a knowing " navvy," who, having spelled it 
through painfully, said to his companion : " I'm 
blest if it isn't as good as any in the church- 
yard ; but a bit too long, eh, mate ? " 

They have quite lately put up, in the 
church's single aisle, a mural monument, in 
which, under twin arches, perked up with 
crocketed commonplaces, are the medallion 
busts of Charles Lamb and William Cowper. 
Under the former — the only one which con- 
cerns us nov7 — is cut this inscription, fitly fol- 
lowed by Wordsworth's impressive lines : " In 
Memory of Charles Lamb, the gentle Elia, and 
author of the Tales from Shakespeare. Born 
in the Inner Temple, 1775, educated at Christ's 
Hospital, Died at Bay Cottage, Edmonton, 
1834, and buried beside his sister Mary in the 
adjoining churchyard — 

" ' At the centre of his being lodged 
A soul by resignation sanctified : 
Oh, he was good, if e'er a good man lived.' " 




i;iE GRAVE OF CHARLES AND MARY ANNE IAMB AT EDMONION. 



INDEX. 



*' A Farewell to Tobacco," 

89. 
Addison, Joseph, 78. 
Ainger, Canon, 25. 
"Album Verses," 12S. 
Aldg-ate, 113. 
"All's Well That Ends Well," 

95. 
Amiens, 99, 100. 
Amwell river, 97, 115. 
Anceps, 114. 
Aram, Eugene, 61, 
Aristotle, 4. 
Ashe river, 23. 
AthencEiim, The, 128. 
Aunt Hetty, 15. 40. 
Austen, Lady, 135. 

Bacon, Francis, 125. 
Balzac, Honore de, 57. 
Bank of England, 139. 
Bartholomew Fair, 112. 
Bartlett's Passage, 11. 
Barton, Bernard, 61. 76, 102. 
Bay Cottage, 137, 140. 
Bedford, Duke of, 7S. 
Bentham, Jeremy, 4. 
Bethnal Green, 114. 
Bird, William, 12. 
Bishopsgate, 29, 113. 
Blakesware, 22, 25, 49, 97. 
Blue-Coat School, The, 17, 20, 

46, 47, 139. 
Bodleian Library, 116. 
Boswell, James, 5. 



Boulogne, 63. 

Bow Bells, 119. 

Bow Street, 78, 79, So. 

Boythorn, 96. 

Braham, J., 5. 

Brick Court, 13. 

Brighton, 98. 

British Ladies' Magazine, 28. 

British Museum, 116, 123, 124. 

Brompton Crescent, 34. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 44, 132. 

Bruce Castle, 114. 

Bruce, Robert, 114. 

" Brutus," 100. 

Buildings, Bartlett's, 11. 

Buildings, Featherstone, 48. 

Buildings, Mitre Court, 53, 54, 

102. 
Buildings, New, 7. 
Buildings, Ram Alley, 8. 
Buildings, Southampton, 41, 

52, 54, 122. 
Bulwer, Lytton, 62. 
Buonaparte, General, 34. 
Burney, Captain, 61, 131. 
Burney, Fanny, 61. 
Burney, Martin, 61, 68, 85, 120. 
Burns, Robert, 133. 
Byron, Lord, 3, 126. 

Cambridge, 98, 107. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 72, 124. 
Gary, Rev'd H. F., 124, 139. 
Car>% F. S., 124. 
Castlereagh, Lord, 70. 



142 



Index. 



Cervantes, 75- 

Chadwell river, 115. 

Chancery Lane, 54, 123. 

Chapel Street, 38, 52. 

Charing Cross, 6, 19. 

Charles T., 115. 

Chatham, Earl of, 34. 

Chelsea China, iii. 

Christ's Hospital, 16, 29, 41, 
42, 69, 116, 140. 

Church Street, 136. 

Cibber, Colley, 78. 

City, The, 6, 26, 47. 

City Road, 103, 

Clare, Allan, 49. 

Clarke, Mrs. Cowden, 132. 

Clifford's Inn, 70. 

Clive, Robert, 27. 

Colburn, H., 126. 

Colebrook Cottage, no, 113, 
116. 

Colebrook Row, 102, 103, 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17, 
19, 20, 33,38,40,41,44,45, 
46, 49, 50, 54, 59, 60, 63, 64, 
65, 66, 77, 85, 96, 97, 98, 
13^ 134- 

" Coleridge, Early Recollec- 
tions of," 126. 

Colman, George, Jr., 5. 

Congreve, William, 5. 

Cornwall, Barry (See Procter). 

Cornwallis, Lord, 27. 

Cook, Captain, 61. 

Coote, Sir Eyre, 27. 

Cottle, Joseph, 126. 

Covent Garden, 78, 80, 81, 102. 

Cowper, William, 5, 135, 140. 

Cranmer, Archbishop, 17. 

Crown Office Row, 7, 8, 13, 14. 

Cunningham, Allan, 61. 

Dalston, 103. 

Dante, 124. 

D'Arblay, Madame, 61. 



Da Vinci, in. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 62, 70, 

93, 108. 

" Deserted Village, The," 13. 
Dickens, Charles, 6, 62. 
Drury Lane Theatre, 72, 81. 
Dryden, John, 3, 78. 
Dyer, George, 42, 68, 69, 70, 
104, 105. 

Eagle House, 139. 

East India Company, no, 135. 

East India House, 5, 26, 30, 

44, 82, 83, 126. 
Edward VL, 17, 116. 
Edmonton, 15, 114, 119, 129, 

134, 135, 139, 140. 
" Elia," 9, 58, 71, 75, 76, 82, 

94, 103, 125, 140. 
"Elia, Bridget," 21, 94. 
"Elia, Last Essays of," iig, 

128. 
Elizabeth, Princess, 116. 
Elliston, R. W., 72. 
Embankment, The, 14. 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64. 
Enfield, 43, 112, 113, 114, 115, 

Ij8, T19, 120, 135. 
Enfield Chase, 115. 
' ' English Bards and Scotch 

Reviewers," 126. 
Englishman's Magazine, The, 

127, 128. 
Epping Hills, 117. 
Essays of Charles Lamb : 

Blakesmoor in H — -shire, 

24. 
Child Angel, The, 16. 
Confessions of a Drunk- 
ard, 74, 90. 
Mackery End, 94. 
My First Play, 42. 
New Year's Eve, 51. 
Old Benchers of the Inner 
Temple, 9. 



[ndex. 



H3 



Old Margate Hoy, The, 9S. 
Peter's Net, 127. 
Popular Fallacies, 127. 
South Sea House, The. 29. 
Superannuated Man, The, 

III. 
Two Races of Men, The, 

31- 

Evans, William, 126. 
Evelyn, John, s, 112. 
Every Day Book^ The, 12, 123. 
" Excursion. The," 86. 
Exeter Exchange, 6. 

Falstaff, 105. 

" Falstaff's Letters," 121. 
Fetter Lane, 3, li. 
Field, Mrs., 22, 25. 
Fielding, Henry, 5, 43. 
Finden, W., 126. 
Fleet Market, The, 18. 
Fleet Street, 19, 122. 
Forster. John, 5. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 3. 
Eraser's Afagazine, 127. 
Fulleylove, John, 14. 

Gardens, The Temple, 14. 

Garrick, David, 9, 123. 

Gate Street, 33. 

Gay, John, 78. 

Gilchrist, Mrs. Annie, 91. 

Gilpin, John, 114, 135, 136. 

Gladmans, The, 21. 

Godwin, William, 60, 94. 

Goethe, 57. 

Goldsmith. Oliver, 5, 13. 

" Good-Natur"d Man, The,' 

13. 

Gottingen, 66. 
Gracechurch Street, 26. 
Gray, Thomas. 107. 
Great Fire, The, 26. 
Great Turnstile, The, 48. 
Gutch, John Mathew, 41, 53. 



Hackney, 40. 
Hackney Downs, 1 14. 
"Hamlet," 67. 

Hancock, 125, 

Hand Court, 48. 

Hare Court, 54. 

Hart Street, 124. 

Hastings, 98. 

Hastings, Warren, 27. 

Hatfield, 114. 

Haydon, Benjamin R., 61, 70, 

71. 77. 
Hazlitt, William, 4, 41, 60, 

65, 66, 73, 74, 77. 85, 91, 

98, 99, 120, 122, 125, 132. 
Hazlitt, Mrs., 69, 98. 
Hazlitt, W. Carew, 3S. 
Helena, 95. 
Heliogabalus, 87. 
Helvellyn, 6. 
Hermia, 95. 
Hertfordshire, 21, 22. 
'• Hester," 51. 

Hogarth, William, 23, 58, iii. 
Holborn, ii, 32, 33, 34, 38, 

39, 40, 41, 48. 
Holland House, 56. 
Hollis Street, 3. 
Holy Trinity Church. 32. 
Hone, William, 12, 123. 
Hood, Thomas, 4, 61, II2, 

113, 115, 118, 120. 
Hook, Theodore, 107. 
Hoole, John, 27. 
House of Commons, The, 86. 
Hoxton, 34, 37, 40, 49. 
Hunt, Leigh, 4, 17, 20, 45, 6r, 

76, III, 120, 125, 126, 131. 

Inner Temple Lane, 8, 9, 54, 

59. 79- 
Irving, Edward, 61, 
Irving, Washington, 3. 
Islington, 50, 52, 102, 104, 

113, 128. 



144 



Index. 



Isola, Emma, 107, 120, 121, 

129. 
Italy, 34, 131. 

James I., 115. 
Johnson, Samuel, 5, 6, 79. 
Joseph, G. F., 126. 
"Juvenile Poems," 136. 

Keats, John, 71, 136. 
Kelly, iMiss, 117. 
King's Bench Walk, 52. 
Knowles, Mr., 34. 
Lakes, The, 98. 

Lamb, Charles (mentioned), 
5, 7, 9, II, 12, 13, 14, 17, 
19, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 31, 

33, 36, 37, 38, 39. 40, 41, 
44,45,46,47,48, 54, 55, 56, 
58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 
66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72. 

73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 85, 
86, 90, 93, 94, 97, 100, 102, 

104, 107, 108, 109, 112, 
115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 
121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 
127, 128, 132, 135, 136, 

137, 138, 139, 140. 
Lamb, John (the father), 9, 

10, 28. 
Lamb, John (the son), 14, 28, 

29, 37, 38, 109. 
Lamb, Mary (mentioned), 5, 

Tl, 13, 14, 15, 21, 28, 38, 

40, 41, 53, 55, 58, 69, 73, 

74, 80, 81, 82, 89, 91, 94, 

95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 

105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 118, 
120, 121, 123, 124, 128, 130, 
132, 138, 140. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 96, 

120, 121. 
Lea river, 97, 114. 
Leadenhall Street, 26, 32, 82, 

no. 



" Lear, King," 77. 

Leighton, Archbishop, 133. 

Leipsic, 66. 

Leishman, Mrs., 113. 

Lime Street, 26. 

Lincoln, Abraham. 75. 

Lincoln's Inn Fields, 32, 33, 
48. 

Lion House, 137. 

Little Britain, 3. 

Little Queen Street, 32, 42, 48. 

Liverpool Road, 38, 

Liverpool Street, 114. 

Lloyd, Charles, 45, 61. 

London, 3, 6, 7, 26, 74, 81, 97, 
100, 115, 130. 

London Fields, 114. 

London Magazine, The, 62, 
76, 82, 128. 

London Road, 136. 

" Lord Byron and His Con- 
temporaries," 126. 

Louvre, The, 100. 

"Lovel,"g. 

Lucan, 64. 

" Lyrical Ballads," 67. 

" Macbeth," 94. 
Mackarel End, 21. 
Mack^ry End, 21, 97, 
Maclise, Daniel, 127. 
Macready, W. C, 72. 
Manning, Thomas, 30, 52, 53, 

55, 61, 67, 72. 
Manse, The, 117. 
Margate, 98. 

Metal Exchange, The, 26. 
Meyer, Henry, 126. 
Middleton, Bishop, 20. 
" Midsummer Night's Dream," 

95- 
Mill, John Stuart, 27. 
Milton, John, 3, 4, 67, 71, 130. 
Moliere, 75. 
Montagu, Basil, 61. 



Index. 



145 



Montaigne, 108. 
Moore, Thomas, 71. 
Morning Chronicle, The, 44. 
Moxon, Edward, 127, 128, 129, 

130, 134- 
Moxon, Mrs., 130, 134, 135. 

" Mr. H , a Farce," 72. 

" Mrs. Leicester's School," 96, 

134- 

Mulready, William, 96. 
Myddleton, Hugh, 115. 

Napoleon, 60. 

Nether Stowey, 64, 97. 

New Monthly Magazine, The, 

127, 128. 
New River, 97, 102, 103, 104, 

115, 116. 
Newgate Street, 17, 46. 
Newton, Isaac, 71. 
Noggs, Newman, 38. 

Occhini, 116. 

Old Bailey, The, 18. 

"On Needle-work," 96. 

Oriental Bank, The, 29. 

Otaheite, 131. 

"Othello," 94. 

Ovid, 23. 

Oxford, 98, 99, 116. 

Palace School, The, 116. 
Paris, 68, 99, 100, loi. 
Patmore, Coventry, 68. 
Payne, John Howard, 99, 100. 
" Pencillings by the Way," 

74. 
Pentonville, 38, 39, 42, 48. 
Pepys, Samuel, 79. 
Petty France, 3. 
Piscator, 114. 
Pitt, William, 43, 115. 
Plantagenet, 14. 
Plumer Family, The, 22. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 71. 



* Poems on Various Subjects," 
44. 

" Poetry for Children," 96. 

Poplars, The, 117. 

Portraits, of Charles Lamb, 
124, 125, 126, 127; of Mary 
Lamb, 124. 

Primrose Hill, 70. 

Prior, Matthew, 9. 

Procter, B. W, (Barry Corn- 
wall), 5, 56, 61, 62, 92, 93, 
104, 107. 

Pulham, Brook, 127. 

Quarterly Review. The, 75. 

Ratcliffe Highway, 70. 
Regent's Canal, The, 103. 
"Religio Medici," 132. 
Rickman, John, 86. 
Ridley, Bishop Nicholas, 17. 
Rippon, Gideon, 139. 
Robinson, Crabb, 58, 59, 62, 

63. 73, 99' 120, 125, 133 
Rousseau, 108. 
Royal Academy, The, 127. 
Russell, Lord John, 66. 
Russell Street, 78, 79, 81, 82, 

90, 102. 

Sadler's Wells, 103. 

St. Andrews, 38, 39. 

St. John's Wood, 135. 

St. Martin's Lane, 6. 

St. Paul's, 19, 47. 

St. Paul's Churchyard, 6. 

Salisbury, 98. 

Salisbury Plain, 56. 

Salt, Samuel, 8, 9, 10, ii, 16, 

30, 32. 
Seine river, 100. 
Seven Sisters, The, 114. 
Sevigne, Madame de, 57. 
Shaftesbury, Lord, 43. 



146 



Index. 



Shakespeare, 14. 21, 43, 67, 68, 

94, 95, 134, 140- 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 45. 
Shelley, Mrs., 131. 
Shenstone, William, 57. 
Siddons, Mrs., 44. 
Silver Street, 114. 
Simmons, Ann, 48, 49. 
Skiddaw, 6. 
Smith, Sydney, 66. 
Smollett, Tobias, 78. 
South Sea House, The, 29. 
Southey, Robert, 46, 75, 76, 
Spenser, Edmund, 5. 
Staple Inn, 54. 

Starkey, , 12. 

Steele, Richard, 78. 
Sterne, Laurence, 57, 75. 
Stoddart, Sarah, 92. 
Strand, The, 6, 75, T31. 
Surrey Hills, The, 52. 
Swift, Jonathan, 9, 43, 78. 
Swinburne, Algernon, 5. 

Table Book, 7'he, 123. 

" Tale of Rosamund Gray and 
Old Blind Margaret," 45, 49. 

" Tales from Shakespear," 96, 
134, 140. 

Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 45, 
56, 62, 126, 133. 

Talma, loi. 

Tasso, 27. 

Taverns : Bell, 135 ; Bell and 
John Gilpin's Ride, 136 ; 
Crown and Horseshoes, ^ 17 I 
Feathers, 48 ; Golden Fleece, 
136 ; Ho7-se and Groom, 136 ; 
Rising Sun, 116 ; Salutation 
and Cat, 46, 47 ; Swan, 114. 

Temple, The, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 
14, 18, 32, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 
79, 80, 90, 94, 102, 140. 

Thackeray, W. M., 87. 

Thames river, 52. 



" This Lime-Tree Bower my 

Prison," 64. 
Threadneedle Street, 29. 
"Three Memorable Murders," 

70. 
Times, The London, 34. 
Titian, 5, ill. 
Tottenham, 113. 
True Briton, The, 36. 
Tuileries, The, 100. 

Van Diemen's Land, 62. 
Versailles, 100. 

Wageman, , 126. 

Wainewright, Thomas, 62, 
Walden, Mr. and Mrs., 129, 

130, 134- 
Walton, Izaak, 10, 114. 
"Walton Redivivus," 115. 
Ware, 25, 97, 114. 
Warwick, Earl of, 14. 
" Waverley," 70. 
Westminster, 3. 
Westwoods, The, 118, 130. 
Wheathampstead, 21. 
White Hart Lane, 114. 
White, James, 121. 
Whittington, Richard, 26. 
Widford, 25, 49. 
Wild, Jonathan, 43. 
Willis, N. P., 74. 
Will's Coffee House, 78. 
Wilson, Walter, 88. 
Wiltshire, 98. 
Winterslow, 98. 
Winterton, Alice, 48, 51. 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 80, 81, 

97. 
Wordsworth, William, 6, 31, 
60, 63, 65, 67, 70, 73, 83, 87, 
90, 97, 107, 109, no, 117, 

135, 140. 
Worsley, P., 120. 
Wren, Sir Christopher, 47. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY, 

BY 

Ernest D. North. 



PAGE 

I. Leading Events in Lamb's Life 149 

II. First Editions 150 

III. The " Elia " Essays 165 

IV. Reviews, Poems, Essays, Etc. 168 

V. Collected Works 170 

VI. Single Works 172 

VII. Letters 181 

VIII. Poetical Works 182 

IX. Lambiana : 

Biography, Criticisms, Etc 182 

Magazine Articles 189 



The measurements given of the First Editions are for uncut copies, 
unless otherwise stated. 

The edition of the Works and Letters of Lamb referred to is Canon 
Ainger's. 

In giving the title-pages no attempt has been made to reproduce the 
various types used. 



I. LEADING EVENTS IN LAMB'S LIFE. 

1775. Born February 10, Crown Office Row, Temple. 

1782 (aged 7). Enters Christ's Hospital School. 

1789 (aged 14). Leaves school and enters service of South Sea 

House. 
1792 (aged 17). Enters service East India Company. 

1795 (aged 20). Resides at No. 7 Little Queen St., Holborn. 

1796 (aged 21). Publishes four Sonnets in volume of " Poems 

by S. T. Coleridge." 

1797 (aged 22). Removes to No. 45 Chapel St., Pentonville. — 

Contributes to "Poems by S. T. Coleridge, 
Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd." 

1800 (aged 25). Writes Epilogue to Godwin's " Antonio." 

1801 (aged 26). Removes to No. 16 Mitre-Court Buildings, 

Temple. 

1802 (aged 27). Publishes "John Woodvil." 

1806 (aged 31). Produces " Mr. H." — a Farce, at Drury Lane. 

1807 (aged 32). Publishes "Tales from Shakespear" — "Mrs. 

Leicester's School." — Writes Prologue for 
" Faulkener," by Godwin. 

1808 (aged 33). Publishes "Specimens of Dramatic Poets" — 

" The Adventures of Ulysses." 

1809 (aged 34). Publishes " Poetry for Children." — Removes 

to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane. — Lives at No. 

34 Southampton Buildings. 
1811 (aged 36). Publishes " Prince Dorus." 
1813 (aged 38). Writes Prologue for Coleridge's " Remorse." 

1817 (aged 42). Removes to No. 20 Russell St., Covent Garden, 

18 18 (aged 43). Publishes " Collected Works." 2 vols. 
1820 (aged 45). Contributes to the London Magazine. 



1 50 Bibliography. 



1823 (aged 4S). Removes to Colebrooke (Colnbrooke) Row, 
Islington. — Publishes "Essays of Elia," 
First Series. 

1825 (aged 50). Retires from East India House. — Contributes 

numerous articles, to Hone's Every Day 
Book. 

1826 (aged 51). Removes to Enfield. 

1827 (aged 52). Contributes Introduction to "The Garrick 

Plays," in Hone's Table Book. 

1829 (aged 53). Lodges in Enfield. 

1830 (aged 55), Publishes "Album Verses." — Contributes 
" De Foe's Works of Genius " to Wilson's 
"Memoirs of Daniel De Foe." 

1831 (aged 56). Publishes " Satan in Search of a Wife." 

1832 (aged 57). Removes to Bay Cottage, Edmonton. 

1833 (aged 58). Publishes " Last Essays of Elia." — Contributes 

Epilogue to "The Wife," by J. Sheridan 
Knowles. 

1834 (aged 59 years 10 months). Charles Lamb dies, December 

27, at Edmonton. 



II. FIRST EDITIONS. 

\Arranged Chronologically. \ 
1796. 

[I] 

Title ; POEMS | ON ] VARIOUS SUBJECTS, | by S. T. 
COLERIDGE, | late of Jesus College, Cambridge | [Quo- 
tation]. London : | Printed for G. G. and J. Robinsons, and | 
J. Cottle, Bookseller, Bristol. | 1796. i6mo. 

Collation : Bastard Title, i page. Title, i page. pp. xvi. 
pp. 188. "Errata," i unnumbered page of Advertisement, 
" Published by the same author." Size 6i X4. 



Bibliography. 151 



Note. Coleridge says in the Preface, " The Effusions signed C. L. 
were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House- independently 
of the signature their superior merit would have sufficiently distin- 
guished them." There are four, viz. : VII. " To Mrs. Siddons." XI. 
Beginning '" Was it some sweet device of faery land ? " XII. Beginning 
" Methinks how dainty sweet it were, reclin'd." XIII. " Written at 
midnight, by the sea-side, after a voyage." 

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., i8go, $9.50 [calf, gilt]. 
Sotheby's, 1887 [morocco, gilt top], £1 15J. 



1797. 

[2] 

Title: POEMS, | BY | S. T. COLERIDGE ] Second edi- 
tion I , to which are now added | Poems | by Charles Lamb | 
and I Charles Lloyd | [Quotation]. Printed by N. Biggs, | for 
J. Cottle, Bristol, and Messrs. | Robinsons, London. | 1797. 
i6mo 

Collation: Title, i page. pp. xx. pp. 278. Size 6|:5^x4|^. 

Note. Lamb's contribution was eight Sonnets and a Dedication, viz.: 
" Fragments," (6) " A Vision of Repentance," in Supplement, '" Child- 
hood," "Grandame," "The Sabbath Bells," "Fancy," "The Tomb of 
Douglas." 

"There were inserted in my former Edition a few Sonnets of my 
Friend and Old Schoolfellow, Charles Lamb. He has now communi- 
cated to me a complete collection of all his Poems — qucs qui nan prorszis 
antet illuvt ofttnes et virtutes et veneres ordore.^'' 

This volume contains two Prefaces, one to the First Edition, signed 
S. T. C, and one to Second Edition, signed "Stowey, May, 1797," 
S. T. C. 

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [calf, gilt top], S8.00. 
Sotheby's, 1S87 [calf], £1 iBj. Sotheby's, 1S88 [calf, gilt], 
^i 5J. Sotheby's, 1887 [calf], £1 10s. 

1798. 

[3] 

Title: BLANK VERSE, | by | CHARLES LLOYD | 
AND CHARLES LAMB. | London : | Printed by T. Bens- 



1 52 Bibliography. 



ley, I for John and Arthur Arch, No 23, Grace- | church Street 
I 1798. i2mo 

Collation : Title, i page. Double Title, i page, Dedication, 
I page. pp. 95. Index, i page. Size 6|x4i. 

P7'ice. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [morocco uncut, gilt top], 
$28.00. Sotheby's, 1890 [original boards, uncut], ^9. 

1798. 
[4] 

Title : A TALE | of | ROSAMUND GRAY | and | OLD 
BLIND MARGARET. | by CHARLES LAMB. | Lon- 
don, I Printed for Lee and Hurst, | No. 32. Pater-nosterRow, | 
1798. Small Svo 

Collation : Title, i page. Dedication, i page. pp. 134. Size 

6f X 4i. 

Note. Another edition was published the same year in Birmingham. 
Printed for l* hos. Pearson, pp. 134, 

With the exception of the title-page this edition is identical with the 
London one. Charles Lloyd's father lived in Birmingham, and it is sug- 
gested that a few copies had been struck off there. [Dedication. "This 
Tale is inscribed in friendship to Marmaduke Thompson, of Pembroke 
Hall, Cambridge."] 

Price. Dodd & Mead [morocco, gilt. Title in fac-simile], 
$50.00. New York, 1885 [Full calf, by Bedford], $25.00. 



1799. 

[5] 

Title : THE I ANNUAL ANTHOLOGY, | Volume I | 
Bristol : Printed by Biggs and Co, For | T. N. Longman and 
O. Rees, Paternoster-Row, | London | n,d. i6mo 

Collation : Title, i page, Advertisement, i unnumbered leaf. 
Contents, 4 unnumbered pages, pp. 300. Size 6| x 4^. 

Note. This volume was edited by Robert Southey, and published by 
Joseph Cottle. Among the distinguished contributors were Coleridge, 
Southey, Charles Lloyd, George Dyer, Mrs. Opie, Joseph Cottle, etc., 



Bibliography. 1 53 



etc. Lamb contributed '• Living Without God in the World," pp. go- 92. 
A second |Series was published the next year [See Letter to Southey, 
November 28, 1798], which contained Coleridge's Poem "This Lime- 
Tree Bower my Prison, A Poem addressed to Charles Lamb of the 
India House," pp. 140-144. 
j Price. Sotheby's, 1888 [original boards, uncut], £1, [calf] 

1800. 

[6] 

Title: ANTONIO: | A TRAGEDY | in Five Acts | 
by WILLIAM GODWIN | , London : Printed by Wilks and 
Taylor, Chancery Lane j For G. G. and J. Robinsons, Pater- 
noster Row I 1800. 8vo 

Collation : Title, I page, Advertisement, i page. (Dramatis 
Personse, reverse.) pp. 73. Size 8hx 5. 

N'ote. Lamb wrote the Epilogue to this tragedy, which was produced 
on December 13, 1800, at Drury Lane. It was a complete failure. [See 
Letter of Lamb to Manning, December 16, iScxd.] 
Price. $3.50. 

1802. 

[7] 

Title: JOHN WOODVIL, | a TRAGEDY | by | C. 
LAMB. I to which are added, | Fragments of Burton, | the au- 
thor of I The Anatomy of Melancholy. | London : | Printed by 
T. Plummer, Seething-Lane : | For G. and J. Robinson, Pater- 
noster-Row I 1802. i6mo 

Collation : Title, i page, Dramatis Personae, i page. pp. 
128. Size 6^x4^, 

J\/'oie. Lamb had written this three years earlier than date of pub- 
lication, and had showed it to Southey and Coleridge, who tried to dis- 
suade him from publishing it. It was offered to John Kemble in 1799, 
but declined. The original title for the play was "Pride's Cure." 

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [calf, gilt top, uncut], 
$19.00. Scribner & Welford, 1889 [boards, uncut], $30,00. 
Dodd & Mead [half morocco, yellow edges] , $25.00. Sotheby's, 



154 Bibliography. 



1889 [autograph from author], ;!^ii 15^-. Pearson, 1889 [un- 
cut, original boards], ;CS loj. 

1807. 

[8] 

Ti^e: MRS. LEICESTER'S SCHOOL. | or, | The His- 
tory I of I several Young Ladies, | related by themselves. | 
London : | Printed for M. J. Godwin, at the Juvenile | Li- 
brary, No. 41, Skinner Street | 1807. i6mo 

Collation: Frontispiece, i page, Title, i page, Contents, i 
unnumbered page. pp. viii. pp. 178. Advertisement on re- 
verse of last page. 

Note. Lamb wrote for this volume "The Witch Aunt," "First 
Going to Church," " The Sea Voyage." The other tales were by Mary. 
The copyright for this and "Tales from Shakespear " was sold to 
Baldwin and Cradock on July 21, 1836, by Mary Ann Lamb, for ^15. 
The original holder, according to the Indenture, was William Godwin. 

Price. The Second Edition, 1809, fetched at Sotheby's, 1888 
[original boards], £\^ 10s, [No quotation found on the First 
Edition.] 

1807. 

[9] 

Title : FAULKENER : | A | TRAGEDY. | as it is per- 
formed I at I the THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE | 
By WILLIAM GODWIN | London : | Printed for Richard 
Phillips, 6, Bridge-Street, | Black-Friars, | By Richard Taylor 
and Co, Shoe Lane, | 1807. 8vo 

Collation: Title, i page, Preface, i page. Prologue, I page, 
Dramatis Personae, i page. pp. 80. Size 8^ x 5. 

Note. The Prologue was by Charles Lamb. The tragedy was pro- 
duced at Drury Lane, December 16, 1807. The subject was taken from 
an incident in De Foe's " Roxana." 

Price, Spencer, 1890 [half morocco], £1 ^s. 



Bibliography. 155 



1807. 
[10] 

Title: TALES | FROM | SHAKESPEAR. | Designed | 
for the use of young Persons. | by CHARLES LAMB. | Embel- 
lished with Copper-Plates. | In two volumes. | Vol I | (Vol 
II) I London : | Printed by Thomas Hodgkins, at the Juvenile 
Li- I brary, Hanway-Street (opposite Soho-Square), | Oxford- 
Street ; and to be had of all | Booksellers | , 1807. | 2 vols 
i2mo. Size 6|- x 4. 

Collation : Vol I. Frontispiece, I page, Title, I page. pp. 
ix. Contents, I page, i unnumbered page. pp. 235. 10 illustra- 
tions. Vol. 11. Frontispiece, i page, Title, I page, Contents, 
I page, I unnumbered page. pp. 261. 3 pages of adver- 
tisements. Colophon: Printed by T, Davison, V\"hitefriars. 

Note. The greater number of these Tales are written by Mary, 
viz. : " Tempest," " As You Like It," " Winter's Tale," " Midsummer 
Night," "Much Ado," "Two Gentlemen of Verona," " Cymbeline," 
"All's Well that Ends Well," "Pericles," " TAning of Shrew," 
" Comedy of Errors," " Measure for Measure," " Twelfth Night ;" the 
others by Charles Lamb : viz., " Othello," " Merchant of Venice," " Mac- 
beth," "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet," "Timon of 
Athens." These volumes seem to have been issued in sheep, there being 
no copies in original boards known. Each volume has ten illustrations, 
engraved by William Blake, from the designs of Mulready. 

Price. Spencer Catalogue, i8go, in the original calf, £2,2. 
Dodd & Mead, 1886 [morocco, gilt top], $75. W. E. Ben- 
jamin, 1887 [morocco, gilt], ^50.00. Sotheby's, 188S [mo- 
rocco, gilt edge], ;^I0. Pickering & Chatto [original calf], 
^T4 14-y- 

1808. 

[II] 

Title: THE j ADVENTURES | of | ULYSSES | by | 
CHARLES LAMB | London : | Printed by T. Davison, White- 
friars | for the Juvenile Library , No. 41 Skinner- | Street, Snow 
Hill I 1808 i6mo 

Collation : Engraved Frontispiece, I page. Vignette Title, 



1 56 Bibliography. 



I page, Title, i page. pp. vi. pp. 203. Advertisement on 
reverse of page 203. Size 6| x 4^. 

Note. "I have done two books since the failure of my farce: they 
will both be out this summer. The one is a juvenile book — the ' Adven- 
tures of Ulysses,' intended to be an introduction to the reading of Tele- 
machus ! It is done out of the Odyssey, not 3'rom the Greek (I would 
not mislead you) nor yet from Pope's Odyssey, but from an older trans- 
lation of one Chapman." See Letter to Manning, February 26, 1808. 

P7-ice. Johnson Sale, New York, 1890 [morocco, gilt], $20. 
Sotheby's, 1888 [calf],;(^3 ^s. bd. — uncut original boards, £'i 3^. 
Sotheby's, 1889 [calf], ;^5 12^-. 6d. Robson & Kerslalce, 1889 
[calf, gilt], ;^8 8j-. Sotheby's, 1889 [calf], ^2 ds. J.Pearson 
[calf, by Bedford], £6 6s. Scribner & Welford [original 
boards, uncut], $16.00. 

1808. 

[12] 

Title: SPECIMENS | of | ENGLISH DRAMATIC 

POETS, I who lived [ about the time of SHAKESPEARE : 

I with Notes. | By Charles Lamb. | London: [ Printed for 

Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, | Paternoster-Row. | 1808, 

small 8vo 

Collation : Bastard Title, i page, Title, I page. pp. xii. 
pp. 484. Size 5 X 7|. 

Note. " It is done out of the old Plays at the Museum and out of 
Dodsley's Collection, etc. It is to have Notes." [See Letter to Manning, 
February 26, 1808.] 

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [morocco, gilt], $7.00. 
Sotheran, 1890 [uncut], £1 2s. J. Pearson, 1890 [half calf, 
gilt top, uncut], £2, 15-$". Scribner & Welford [boards, un- 
cut], $16.50. 

1809. 

[13] 

Title : POETRY | for | CHILDREN | ENTIRELY ORI- 
GINAL I By the Author of | " Mrs. Leicester's School" | In 
Two volumes | vol I | (vol II) | London : | Printed for M. 



Bibliography. 157 



J. Godwin, | At the Juvenile Librar}', No. 41, Skinner Street, 

I 1809. 2 vols i8mo 
Collation : Vol. I. Frontispiece, i page, Title, i page, Table 
of Contents i page. pp. 103. i page of Advertisement. 
Colophon : Mercier and Shervet, Printers, No. 32, Little Bar- 
tholomew Close, London. Vol. IL Frontispiece, i page. 
Title, I page. Table of Contents, i page. pp. 104. Colophon : 
Printed by Mercier and Chervet, No. 32, Little Bartholomew 
Close, London. Bound in gray paper with green leather 
backs. 

Note. Lamb contributed to this " The Three Friends," "To a River 
in which a Child was Drowned," " Queen Oriana's Dream," besides 
other poems not certainly identified ; the rest were by Mary. The Fron- 
tispiece to Vol. I. is a little boy seated in a Landscape, with the line 
" Keep on your own side, do Grey Pate. Page 29." Vol. IL, the Fron- 
tispiece is " Penitent Richard standing in a Landscape," with three lines 
of poetry. At the time of the Locker Catalogue, 1886, only one perfect 
copy was known [see Gentlejnan' s Magazine^ July, 1877, for account of 
its discovery]. It was reprinted at Boston in 1812. A iVLrs. Tween, 
daughter of Lamb's friend Mr. Randall Norris, has a copy of " Poetry 
for Children " given her by Mary Lamb. 

Price. Sotheby's, 1888, £2)^ [Leycester's Sale, November 
12-14]. 

1811. 

[14] 

Title : PRINCE DORUS : | or, ] Flattery put out of 
Countenance. | A Poetical Version of an Ancient Tale. | Il- 
lustrated with a series of Elegant Engravings. | London : | 
Printed for M. J. Godwin, | at the Juvenile Library, No 41 
Skinner St ; | and to be had of all Booksellers and Toymen in 
the I United Kingdom. | 181 1. i2mo 

Collatiofi : Frontispiece, i page. Title, i page. pp. 31. 
Illustrations: Frontispiece to face Title, "The Enchanted 
Cat;" p. 6, " Minon Asleep;" p. 7, "The Transforma- 
tion ; " p. 10, " Prince Dorus and his Maids ; " p. ig, " Clari- 
bel Carried Off;" p. 21, "Visit to the Beneficent Fairy ; " 
p. 23, "Prince Dorus Offended;" p. 29, "Truth Brought 



1 58 Bibliography. 



Home ;" p. 31, " Self Knowledge obtains its Reward." Size 
5ix4|. 

Note. Only a few copies known to exist. The authenticity of this 
volume is established by a reference in Crabb Robinson's Diary, May 
15, 1811. There are two editions, plain and colored, not differing in 
any other particular. The back cover should be preserved, as it con- 
tains a curious woodcut of Prince Dorus (The Long-nosed King) and 
Aged Fairy. There are copies with Title-page put on cover within a 
key border. 

Price. Dodd & Mead [188S], $175 ; colored [1888], mo- 
rocco, $300. Sotheby's, 1888, £'})0. Sotheby's, 1889 [colored, 
dated 181S], ^45. Sotheby's, 1890, £2(^ 10s. [original boards]. 

181 I (?). 

[15] 

Title: BEAUTY ] AND | THE BEAST : | or | A rough 
OUTSIDE WITH A | Gentle HEART | A Poctical version of an 
Ancient Tale | Illustrated with a | Series of Elegant Engravings 

I And Beauty's Song at Her Spinning Wheel [Set to Music 
by Mr Whitaker | London : | Printed for M. J. Godwin, | At 
the Juvenile Library, 41, Skinner Street ; | and to be had of all 
Booksellers and Toymen | throughout the United Kingdom. | 
Price 5s 6d coloured, or 3s. 6d. plain | Square i6mo, n.d. 

Collation : Frontispiece, i page. Title, i page. pp. 32. 
Colophon, London : Printed by B. M'Millan, [ Bow Street, 
Covent Garden | . Illustrations : Frontispiece, "Beauty in her 
prosperous state." Face page 4, " Beauty in a State of Ad- 
versity." Page II, "The Rose Gather'd." Page 16, 
"Beauty in the Enchanted Palace." Page 19, "Beauty 
visits her Library." Page 21, "Beauty entertained with in- 
visible music." Page 28, •' The absence of Beauty Lamented." 
Page 29, " The Enchantment Dissolved." Music : Beauty's 
Song [music and second verse on reverse]. Size 51x4^, 

Note. The original is in paper-covered boards, roxburghe backs, 
with woodcut, underneath which are written the words " ' Go, be a 
Beast!' Homer." The engravings are supposed to be by Maria Flax- 
man, sister of the sculptor. On page 3 there is a water-mark dated 1810. 



Bibliography. 1 59 



Price. Sotheby's, July 9, 1889 [" Sale of Original Drawings 
to Martin Chuzzlewit "], etc., fetched ^^34. Sotheby's [plates 
misplaced], 1890, £20. 

1813. 

[16] 

Title : REMORSE. | A TRAGEDY, | in five acts. ! By 
S. T. COLERIDGE | . [Quotation] London : | printed for W. 
Pople, 67, Chancery Lane. | 1813 j Price three shillings. | 8vo. 

Collation : Title, i page. pp. viii. Prologue, i unnum- 
bered page, Dramatis Personse, i unnumbered page. pp. 72. 
Size 5ix8i 

JVo^e. The Prologue was written by Lamb and spoken by Mr. Carr. 
The Play, written in 1797, was originally entitled " Osorio." It was 
brought out, revised, and re-named " Remorse," at Drury Lane, on 
January 23, 1813, and had a run of twenty nights. The London Times 
of January 25 said of the Prologue : " The Prologue was, we hope, by 
some 'd— d good natured friend,' who had an interest in injuring the 
play. It was abominable." 

Price. Scribner & Welford [half calf], $6.50. 

1814. 

[17] 

Title : SOME | ENQUIRIES | INTO | THE EFFECTS 
I of I FERMENTED LIQUORS. | By a Water Drinker. | 
London : | Printed for J. Johnson and Co. | St. Paul's Church 
yard | 1814. 8vo 

Collation : Frontispiece, i page. Title, i page. Table of 
Contents, i page. pp. xxxii. pp. 368. Five illustrations, in- 
cluding Frontispiece. Size 8^ x 5^. 

Note. Charles Lamb contributed sixteen pages to this volume 
anonymously, viz.: pp. 201-216, entitled "Confessions of a Drunkard." 
The author and compiler was Basil Montagu. The Essay, with a few 
additional pages, was reprinted in the London Magazine., August, 1822, 
and signed " Elia." 

Price. Sotheby's, 1888 [calf gilt], £2 los. Hitchman's, 1890 
[boards, uncut], 2ij. Sotheran's [calf, by Bedford], £l lO-s"- 



i6o Bibliography. 



Pearson's, 1889 [boards, uncut], £1 5^. Scribner & Welford, 
$25.00 [calf]. 

1818. 

[18] 

Title : THE | WORKS 1 OF | CHARLES LAMB. | In 
TWO VOLUMES. | vol I | (vol II) | London : | Printed for C. and 
J. Oilier, I Vere-street, Bond-street | 1818. 2 vols i6mo 

Collation : Vol. I. Title, i page. pp. ix. i unnumbered 
page. pp. 291. Vol. II. Title, i page, Contents, i unnum- 
bered page, Inscription, i unnumbered page. pp. 259. Ad- 
vertisement, 2 pages. Size 6^ x 4^. 

Note. The dedication is to Coleridge, and in it Lamb says: "My 
friend Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of 
warfare) under cover of the great Ajax." There are two different issues 
of this date, one on thicker paper and a trifle taller than the other. 

Price. Sotheby's, 18S7 [half calf], £1 ^s. [calf, uncut], £2. 
Sotheran [original boards, with book label of Wm. Hazlitt], 
£S 5-$". Sotheby's, 1889 [original boards], £2 10s. J. Pearson, 
1889 [original boards, uncut], £i\ ^s. Scribner & Welford 
[original boards, uncut], $25.00, 



1823. 

[19] 
Title : ELIA. | Essays which have appeared under 

THAT SIGNATURE | IN THE | LONDON MAGAZINE. | Loudon : | 
Printed for Taylor and Hessey, | 93, Fleet Street, | and 13, 
Waterloo Place. | 1823. i2mo 

Collation : Bastard Title, i page. Title, i page, Contents, 2 
unnumbered pages, pp. 341. Size 7I x 5. 

Note. These Essays were contributed mainly to the London Maga- 
zine between August, 1820, and October, 1822. 

Price. Sotheby's, 1887 [calf], ^i. [Elia and Last Essays 
together] Sotheby's, 1888 [russia, uncut], ;^ii 15J. 



Bibliography. i6i 



1825-6. 
[20] 

Title: THE i EVERY-DAY BOOK : | or, the | Guide to 
THE Year; | relating the | Popular Amusements, | Sports, Cere- 
monies, Manners, Customs, and Events, | incident to | the 365 
Days I in past and present Times ; | being | A Series of 5000 
Anecdotes and Facts ; | forming | a History of the Year, | A 
calendar of the Seasons, | and ) a chronological Dictionary of 
the Almanac ; | with a variety of | important and diverting in- 
formation, I for daily use and Entertainment, | Compiled from 
authentic sources | by William Hone | [Quotation from Her- 
rick] I Illustrated by Numerous Engravings | London: | Printed 
for William Hone, 45, Ludgate Hill, | (to be published every 
Saturday, price Threepence,) | and sold by All booksellers in 
Town and Country. | 1825. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Collation ; Vol. I. Title, i page, Double Title, i page, Ex- 
planatory Address, i page, Dedication, i unnumbered page. 
Preface, i unnumbered page, Illustration, " Bona Dea," i page, 
pp. 852. Vol. II. Frontispiece, i page, Title, i page, Dedi- 
cation, I page, Preface, i unnumbered page. pp. viii. pp. 832. 
General Index, ig pages. 

Note. This was issued in weekly parts and a new title-page printed 
when bound. The Dedication of the first volume is to Charles Lamb. 
'to these volumes he contributed " The Months," April 16, 1826 [Vol. 
II.] ; " Reminiscence of Sir Jeffrey Dunstan," June 22, 1826 [Vol. II.] ; 
"Captain Starkey," July 21, 1825 [Vol. I.] ; "The Ass," October 5, 1825 
[Vol. I.] ; " In Re Squirrels," October 17, 1825 [Vol. I.] ; " Remarkable 
Correspondent," May i, 1825 [Vol. I.] ; "The Humble petition of an 
unfortunate Day," August 12, 1826 [Vol. I.] ; " Quatrains to the Editor," 
July 9, 1825 [Vol. I.]. 

Price. Sotheby's, 18S9, £1 8.?. 

1827. 

[21] 

Title : THE | TABLE BOOK ; | by William Hone, f 
with Engravings. [Motto] Every Saturday, ] London : | Pub- 



1 62 Bibliography. 



lished for William Hone, | by Hunt and Clarke, York-Street, 
I Covent-Garden, | 1827, 8vo 

Collation : Frontispiece [Petrarch's Inkstand], i page, Title, 
I page, Preface, i unnumbered page. pp. 870. 

Note. This, like the other books of Hone, was issued in Parts, every 
Saturday, commencing January i, 1827, Lamb's contributions being, p. 
454, " Mrs. Gilpin riding to Edmonton," and p. 387, " Gone or Going," 
and the Introductions to the Garrick plays, which are on pages 56, 67, 80, 
96, IT2, 128, 150, 162, 178, 192, 209, 224, 243, 256, 280, 291, 304, 320, 338, 352, 
368, 394, 400, 417, 440, 449, 467, 480, 500, 514, 530, 547, 578, 595, 610, 642, 663, 
676, 690, 704, 724, 737, 770, 784, 8co, 817. In a note addressed to Hone, 
dated January 27, 1827, written on the fly-leaf of a copy of "Specimens 
of English Dramatic Poets," Lamb proposed this series, to which the 
editor gladly acceded. The copy named is now owned in New York. 
Price. £1 los. 

1830. 

[22] 

Title: MEMOIRS I of I THE LIFE AND TIMES | 
of I DANIEL DEFOE : | containing 1 a review of his writings, 
I and I his opinions upon a variety of important matters, civil 
and I ecclesiastical. [ By Walter Wilson, Esq. Of the Inner 
Temple. [ In Three volumes. | London : | Hurst, Chance, and 
Co. I 1830. 3 vols 8vo 

Collation : Vol. I. Bastard Title, i page, Frontispiece, i 
page, Title, i page, i unnumbered page, pp. Ixii. Errata, i 
page. pp. 482. — Vol. 11. Bastard Title, i page. Title, i page, 
pp. xviii. Errata, i unnumbered page. pp. 527. — Vol. III. Bas- 
tard Title, I page. Title, i page. pp. xviii. Errata, i unnum- 
bered page. pp. 685. 

Note. On pages 428-9, Vol. III., appears Lamb's criticism on " De 
Foe's Works of Genius." [Mr. Wilson says : "The following remarks 
upon De Foe's Works of Genius are from the pen of the Author's highly 
esteemed friend, Charles Lamb, and are original."] Pages 636, 7, 8, g 
Lamb's remarks on " De Foe's Secondary Novels " appear. These are 
of so characteristic a nature that they are well worth perusal. [Wilson 
adds : " To recall the attention of the public to his other fictions, the pres- 
ent writer is happy to enrich his work with some original remarks upon 
his Secondary Novels, by his early friend Charles Lamb, whose compe- 



Bibliography. 163 



tency to form an accurate judgment upon the subject, no one will doubt 
who is acquainted with his genius."] 

Price. Scribner & Welford [Full calf], $18.00. 

1830. 

L23] 

Title : ALBUM VERSES, | with a few others, | by 
Charles Lamb, | [vignette] London : | Edward Moxon, 64, 
New Bond Street. | 1830 i2mo 

Collation : Title, i page. pp. vii. pp. 150. Size 7I x 4^. 
Note. Dedication to Moxon. '' Enfield, ist June," 1830. This volume 
contains '' Album Verses," "■ Miscellaneous," "Sonnets," "Commend- 
atory Verses," " Acrostics," " Translations from the Latin of Vincent 
Bourne," "Pindaric ode to the Treadmill," " Epicedium," and "The 
Wife's Trial." 

Price. Scribner & Welford [uncut, original boards], $15.00. 
Sotheby's, i88g [calf], ;i^i ^s. Sotheby's, iSgo [original 
boards], £1 10s, 

1831. 

[24] 

Title : SATAN IN SEARCH OF A WIFE ; | with the 
Whole Process of [ his Courtship and Marriage, | and who 
Danced at the Wedding. | by | an Eye Witness [Engraved 
Title] London : | Edward Moxon, 64 New Bond Street. | 
M.DCCC.XXXI. 

Collation : Engraved (wood) Frontispiece, i page. Engraved 
(wood) Title, i page. Dedication, i unnumbered page, pp. 36. 
[Frontispiece and four illustrations.] Size 6^ x 3|. 

Note. See " Letter to Moxon, October 24, 1831." Illustrations, [wood- 
cuts,] should face pages 8, 21, 32, with tail-piece [" To delicate bosoms, 
that have sighed over the ' Loves of the Angels,' this poem is with ten- 
derest regard consecrated"]. The original cover should be preserved. 

Price. Sotheby's, 1888 [calf, gilt edge], £2 3^. Sotheby's, 
1890 [original wrappers], ;i^8. 



164 Bibliography. 



[25] 

Ti^e ; THE WIFE : | A Tale of Mantua, | A Play, In Five 
Acts, I By I James Sheridan Knowles, | Author of " Virgin- 
ius " "The Hunchback" &c | London: | Edward Moxon. 
Dover Street. | 1833. 8vo 

Collation ,' Advertisement, i page, Title, i, Dedication, i 
page, Preface, i page, Prologue, i page. Dramatis Personse, 
I page. pp. 120. Size 8j x 5. 

Note. The Epilogue was written by Charles Lamb and spoken by 
Miss Ellen Tree. Knowles, in the edition of his plays 1833, speaks of his 
debt to Lamb, etc. 
Price. $2.50. 

1833. 
[26] 

Title : THE LAST ESSAYS | of 1 ELIA. | Being | a 
sequel to Essays published under | that Name. | London : | 
Edward Moxon, Dover Street. | 1833. ] i2mo 

Collation : Bastard Title, i page. Title, I page. pp. xii. pp. 
283. Size 8x5. 

Note. The Preface, somewhat changed, was originally published in 
the London Magazine and signed Phil-Elia. 

Price. Johnson Sale, New York, i8go [Full morocco, uncut, 
with First Series], $42.00. Sotheran, London, 1890 [Full calf],^ 
£^ \os. [Both Series, half morocco,] £2 loj. J. Pearson, 
1890, Both Series [original boards, uncut], £\o los, Scribner 
& Welford [morocco gilt on the rough], $60.00. 



1796. 

[27] 
Title : ORIGINAL LETTERS, Etc. \ of ] SIR JOHN 
FALSTAFF | AND | HIS FRIENDS : | now first made pub- 
lic by a Gentleman, | a descendent of Dame Quickly, | from | 
genuine manuscripts | which have been in the possession | of 
the Quickly family | near four hundred years. | London : | 



Bibliography. 165 



Printed for the author ; | and published by | Messrs. G, G. & 
J. Robinsons, Paternoster-Row : | J. Debrett, Piccadilly : and 
Murray and | Highley | No. 32, Fleet Street, | 1796 Small 8vo 

Collation : Frontispiece, i page, Title, i page. pp. xxiv, pp. 
123. Size 6^ X4. 

Note. Canon Ainger states [See page 404 "Elia"] that Southey 
believed Lamb had a hand in this work. The Preface in particular bears 
some traces of his peculiar vein. See also Letter from Gutch to Mr. 
Bliss, page 155, Hazlitt's " Charles and Mary Lamb." 

Price. New York, 1886, [calf, gilt,] $15.00. Robson & 
Kerslake [calf, uncut], £,2> V- 1888. 

III. THE "ELIA" ESSAYS. 

All Fools' Day April, 1821, London Magazine. 

Amicus Redivivus Dec. 1823, " " 

Bachelor's Complaint of the Be- 
haviour of Married People (A) Sept. 1822, " 
Barbaras April, 1825, 

Barrenness of the Imaginative -. \ 

Jan. / 
Faculty m the Productions -p , >• 1825, AthencsMm. 

of Modern Art ) 

Blakesmoor in H. shire. . . .Sept. 1824, London Magazine, 

Captain Jackson Nov. 1824, " " 

Chapter on Ears (A) March, 1821 '*' " 

Character of the Late Elia Jan. 1S23, 

Child Angel: A Dream (The).. June, 1S23, 

Christ's Hospital Five and 

Thirty Years Ago Nov. 1820, " " 

Complaint of the Decay of Beg- 
gars in the Metropolis (A) .. .June, 1822, 

Confessions of a Drunkard Aug. 1822, "' *' 

Convalescent (The) July, 1825, " " 

Detached Thoughts on Books 

and Reading July, 1822, 

Dissertation upon Roast Pig (A). Sept. 1822, 

Distant Correspondents Mar. 1S22, 



1 66 Bibliography. 



Dream-Children ; A Reverie. . .Jan. 1822, London Magazine. 

Ellistoniana Aug. i?)2,i,E7tglishman' s Mag. 

Genteel Style in Writing (The) March, i?>2b, New Monthly Mag. 

Grace before Meat Nov. 1821, Loftdon Magazine. 

Imperfect Sympathies Aug. 1821, " " 

Mackery End, in Hertfordshire. July, 1821, " " 

Modern Gallantry Nov. 1822, " " 

Mrs. Battle's Opinions on 

Whist Feb. 1821, 

My First Play Dec. 1821, " " 

My Relations June, 1821, " " 

Newspapers Thirty-five Years 

Ago Oct. I'i'},!., Englishman' s Mag. 

New Year's Eve Jan. 1821, London Magazine. 

Old and the New Schoolmaster 

(The) May, 1821, 

Old Benchers of the Inner Tem- 
ple (The) Sept. 1821, 

Old China March 1823, 

Old Margate Hoy (The) July, 1823, 

On Some of the Old Actors Feb. 1822, " " 

On the Artificial Comedy of the 

Last Century April, 1822, " «< . 

On the Acting of Munden Oct. 1822, " " 

Oxford in the Vacation Oct. 1820, " " 

Poor Relations May, 1823, " " 

Popular Fallacies : j ''^^^'1826^^^^' } "^^^ Monthly Mag. 

1. That a Bully is always a Coward. .. . " " 

2. That Ill-gotten Gain never prospers. 

3. That a man must not laugh at his 

own jest 

4. That such a one shows his breeding, 

etc. . . , 

5. That the Poor copy the vices of the 

Rich 



Bibliography. 167 



6. That Enough is as good as a Feast. .New Monthly Mag. 

7. Of two Disputants, the Warmest is 

generally in the Wrong. ... " " 

8. That verbal Allusions are not Wit, 

because they will not bear trans- 
lation " " 

9. That the Worst Puns are the Best. . . " ** 

10. That Handsome is that Handsome 

Does " 

11. That we must not look a Gift-Horse 

in the Mouth *' ** 

12. That Home is Home though it is 

never so Homely " ** 

13. That you must love me and love My 

Dog " *' 

14. That we should rise with the Lark. . " '•' 

15. That we should lie down with the 

Lamb 

16. That a sulky temper is a Misfortune. " " 
Praise of Chimney-Sweepers(The)May, 1822, London Magazine. 

Quakers' Meeting (A) April, 1821, " " 

Rejoicings upon the New Year's 

Coming of Age Jan. 1823, " " 

Sanity of True Genius May, 1826, New Moiithly Mag. 

Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Syd- 
ney Sept. 1823, London Magazine. 

South-Sea House (The) Aug. 1820, " " 

Stage Illusion Aug. 1825, " " 

Superannuated Man (The) 

To the Shade of Elliston Aug. 1^2)'^, Englishman'' s Mag. 

Tombs in the Abbey (The) Oct. 1823, London Magazine. 

Two Races of Men (The) Dec. 1820, 

Valentine's Day Feb. 14, 1821, The Indicator. 

Wedding (The) June, 1825, London Magazine. 

Witches, and Other Night Fears. Oct. 1821, " ** 



Bibliography. 



IV. REVIEWS, POEMS, ESSAYS, Etc. 



Annual Anthology (Cottle's), 
1799, " Living without God 
in the World." 

AthencBum {The), [Prose] Feb- 
ruary II, 1832, "On the 
Death of Munden." Jan- 
uary 12, 19, 26, February 
2, 1833, " On the Total 
Defect of the Quality of 
Imagination observable in 
the works of Modern British 
Artists." November 30,1833, 
" Thoughts on Presents of 
Game." January 4, May 
31, June 7, July 19, 1834, 
" Table Talk by the Late 
Elia." [Poems] January 7, 
1832, "The Self Enchant- 
ed." February 25, " The 
Parting Speech of the Celes- 
tial Messenger to the Poet." 
July 7, " Existence, consid- 
ered in itself, no blessing." 
March 9, 1833, "Christian 
Names of Women." Decem- 
ber 7, " To a friend on his 
Marriage." December 21, 
" To T. Stothard, Esq., on 
his Illustrations of the Poems 
of Mr. Rogers." February 
15, 1834, " Cheap Gifts : 
A Sonnet." July 26, 1834, 
" To Clara N." March 14, 
1835, "To Margaret W." 

Blackwood's Magazine, De- 
cember, 1828, " The Wife's 
Trial." January, 1829, "The 
Gipsy's Malison." May, 
1829, " The Christening." 

Bristol Journal {The), Febru- 



ary 7, 18 19," Miss Kelley at 
Bath." (Signed, * * * *) 

Champion {The), December 4, 
1814, " On the Melancholy 
of Tailors." (Signed, Burton 
Junior.) 

Examiner{ The), 1822, " Work." 
June 6, 1813, " The Rey- 
nolds Gallery," " Theatrical 
Notices." July 4, 1819, 
" Richard Brome's Jovial 
Crew," "Isaac Bickerstaff's 
Hypocrite," August 2, 18 19. 
"New Pieces at the Ly- 
ceum, "August, 1819. (These 
were all signed * * * -x- ^ 
January 16, 1820, " First 
Fruits of Australian Poetry," 
(numerous Epigrams, etc.) 

Englishman's Magazine, Sep- 
tember, 1 83 1, " Recollec- 
tions of a late Royal Acade- 
mician." 

Gentleman' s Magazine { The), 
June, 1813, " Recollections 
of Christ's Hospital." 

Gern {The), 1830, "Saturday 
Night." 

Hone's Every Day Book, April 

16, 1826, "The Months." 
June 22, 1826, " Reminis- 
cence of Sir Jeffrey Dun- 
stan." July 21, 1825, " Cap- 
tain Starkey." October 5, 
1825, " The Ass." October 

17, 1825, " In Re Squir- 
rels." May I, 1S25, " Re- 
markable Correspondent." 
August 12, 1825, " The 
Humble Petition of an Un- 



Bibliography. 



169 



fortunate Day.'* July 9,1825, 
" Quatrains to the Editor." 
Hone's Table Book, p. 454 
[1827]. " Mrs. Gilpin riding 
to Edmonton." 1827, " Epi- 
cedium," ' ' Gone or Going," 

p. 3S7. 

Juduator{The),']2iXina.xy, 1831, 
" Elia to his Correspon- 
dents." 

London Magazine, April, 1821, 
" Leisure." December, 1822, 
" Guy Faux." October, 
1823, " Letter to Robert 
Southey, Esq." October, 
1823, " Letter of Elia to his 
Correspondents." Novem- 
ber, 1823, " The Gentle 
Giantess." November, 1823, 
" On a Passage in the Tem- 
pest." January, 1825, " Let- 
ter to an Old Gentleman 
whose Education has been 
Neglected." January, 1825, 
" Biographical Memoirs of 
Mr. Liston." February, 
1825, "Autobiography of 
Mr. Munden." March, 
1825, " Reflections in the 
Pillory." April, 1825, 
" The Last Peach." 

Morning Chronicle, 1794, Son- 
net, commencing: "As 
when a child on some long 
winter's night." [Written 
probably in conjunction with 
Coleridge.] 

Monthly Magazine, January, 
1797, " To Sara and her 
Samuel." 



New Monthly Magazine, 1825, 
" The Illustrious Defunct." 
1826, " The Religion of 
Actors." June, 1826. "A 
Popular Fallacy." April, 
1835. " Charles Lamb's Au- 
tobiography." 1835, " On 
the Death of Coleridge." 

Quarterly Review, October, 
1814, " Wordsworth's Ex- 
cursion." 

Reflector i^The) [Leigh Hunt's], 
1811, Vol. IV., "A Fare- 
well to Tobacco." 

Theatralia (No. i). " On 
the Tragedies of Shake- 
speare," 18 11. "Specimens 
from the writings of Fuller," 
181 1 (No. 4). " On the 
Genius and Character of Ho- 
garth," 1811 (No. 3). "On 
Burial Societies, and the 
Character of an Under- 
taker," 1811 (No. 2, Art, 
15), " On the Inconve- 
niences resulting from being 
hanged," 181 1 (No, 3, Art. 
13), " On the Danger of 
Confounding Moral with 
Personal Deformity," 1811 
(No. 2, Art. 15). " Hospita 
on the Immoderate Indul- 
gence of the Pleasures of the 
Palate," i8ri (No. 4). 
" Edax on Appetite," 181 1 
(No. 4). " On the Custom 
of Hissing at Theatres," 
1811 (No 3, Art. II). 
" The Good Clerk," 1811 
(No. 4, Art. 23). 



170 



Bibliography. 



V. COLLECTED WORKS. 



1818. The Works of Charles 
Lamb. In two volumes. Lon- 
don, C. & J. Oilier, 1818. 2 
vols. i2mo. 
The first collected edition. 

1835. The Prose Works of 
Charles Lamb. London, Mox- 
on, 1835. 3 vols. i2mo. 

1836. Prose Works of 
Charles Lamb. London, Mox- 
ou. 1836. 3 vols. 8vo. 

1838. The Prose Works of 
Charles Lamb. London, Mox- 
on, 1838. 3 vols. i2mo. 

The Same, 1839. 

The Same. 4 vols. 

1840. 

Another edition, 1847. 

1S38. The Works of Charles 
Lamb, comprising his Letters, 
Poems, Essays of Elia, etc., 
etc., with Sketch of his Life, 
by T. N. Talfourd. New 
York, Harper & Bros., 1838. 
2 vols. i2mo. 

1840. The Works of Charles 
Lamb [edited by Talfourd, with 
Sketch of Life, portrait and en- 
graved title]. London, Moxon, 
1840. 8vo. 

The Same. 1845. 8vo. 

The Same. 1852. 8vo. 

1850. The Prose and Poetical 
Works of Charles Lamb, with 
his Letters and Life, by T. N. 
Talfourd. London, Moxon, 
1850. 4 vols. i2mo. 
Another edition. Lon- 



don, 1852. 

— Another edition, 
don, 1855. 



Lon- 



1855. Works, with a Sketch 
of his Life and Final Memo- 
rials, by Sir T. N. Talfourd. 
New York, Harper & Bros., 

1855. 2 vols. i2mo. 

1856. Another edition. 

Philadelphia, W. P. Plazard, 

1856. 4 vols. 8vo. 

1S57. Works, with Life, by 
Sir T. N. Talfourd. New York, 

1857. 2 vols. i2mo. 

1859. The Works of Charles 
Lamb. A new edition. [Por- 
trait by Wageman, engraved 
title of Christ's Hospital.] 
London, Moxon & Co., 1859. 
8vo. 

1865. The Works of Charles 
Lamb. A new edition. In 
five volumes. [Portrait by 
Wageman.] Boston, William 
Veazie, 1865. 5 vols. i2mo. 

A large paper edition of only 100 
copies was issued at the same 
time. 

1865. The Works of Charles 
Lamb, corrected and revised, 
with Portrait. New York, 
Widdleton, 1865. 5 vols. 
i2mo. 

1867. The Works of Charles 
Lamb, including his most in- 
teresting Letters, collected and 
edited, with Memorials, by Sir 
T. N. Talfourd. Anew edition. 
London, Bell & Daldy, 1867. 
8vo. 

1868. The Complete Cor- 
respondence and Works of 
Charles Lamb, with an "Es- 
say on the Genius of Charles 



Bibliography. 



171 



Lamb," by George Augustus 
Sala [edited by W. C. Hazlitt]. 
London, E. Moxon& Co.,i86S. 
4 vols. i2mo. 

It is only justice to Mr. Hazlitt to 
say that this edition was issued 
without his name upon the title- 
page ; he did not even see the 
proofs. 

1870. The Complete Corres- 
pondence and Works of Charles 
Lamb, with an Essay on his 
Life and Genius, by Thomas 
Purnell, aided by the Recol- 
lections of the author's adopted 
daughter [Mrs. Moxon]. [Por- 
trait of Charles and Mary, the 
former seated.] London, Ed- 
ward Moxon, 1870. 4 vols. 
i2mo. 

This edition contains a new Pre- 
face by Thomas Purnell. It has 
the first volume withdrawn of 
the issue of i568. 

1870. Works and Letters, by 
Talfourd." London, Bell & 
Daldy, 1870. 8vo. 

1874. The Complete Works, 
in Prose and Verse, of Charles 
Lamb, from the original edi- 
tions, with the cancelled pas- 
sages restored, and many pieces 
now first collected. Edited 
and prefaced by R. H. Shep- 
herd. [Portrait.] London, 
Chatto & Windus, 1874. 8vo. 

The Same, 1875. 

The Same, 1878. 

1875. The Life, Letters, and 
Writings of Charles Lamb, ed- 
ited, with Notes and Illustra- 
t i o n s by Percy Fitzgerald. 
[Portrait by William Hazhtt.] 
London, Edward Moxon, 1S75. 
6 vols. 8vo. 

In this edition the narrative por- 



tion of Talfourd's two works 
has been retained, condensed 
into one continuous narrative, 
with additions both in text and 
notes, while the Letters are 
separated from Talfourd"s orig- 
inal matter and arranged in 
groups, forty new ones being 
added. 

The Same, 1S76. 

The Same, 18S2-4. 

1876. Works. Edited by 
Charles Kent. [Routledge's 
Standard Library.] London, 
1876. Crown 8vo. 

The Same. London, 

1889. 

1876. Works, Poetical and 
Dramatic, Tales, etc. Rout- 
ledge, 1876. 8vo. 

1879. The Complete Works: 
with a Sketch of his Life, by 
Sir T. N. Talfourd. Personal 
Reminiscences of Lamb, Cole- 
ridge, Southey, Wordsworth, 
and J. Cottle, by an American 
Friend. [Enfield Edition.] 
Portrait and Engravings. 
Philadelphia, 1879, Amies Pub. 
Co. 8vo. 

1880. Works, etc., new edi- 
tion. [Standard.] New York, 
1880. 3 vols. i2mo. 

1884. Works, etc. New 
York, 1884. 5 vols. i2m.o. 

i386. The Life, Letters, and 
Writings of Charles Lamb. 
Edited, with Notes and Illus- 
trations, by Percy Fitzgerald. 
London, John Slark, 1SS6. 6 
vols. i2mo. 
An exact reprint of the edition of 
1875- 

1885. [Collected edition. Ed- 
ited, with Notes and Introduc- 
tions, by Alfred Ainger.] Tales 
from Shakespeare, by Charles 



172 



Bibliography. 



and Mary Lamb, 1878. — The 
Essays of Elia, 1883. — Poems, 
Plays, and Miscellaneous Es- 
says, 1884. — Mrs. Leicester's 
School and other Writings in 
Prose and Verse, 1885. — The 
Letters of Charles Lamb, new- 
ly arranged, with additions. 



Portrait. 2 vols. 1888. — 

Charles Lamb, 1888. 
This is by far the best edition 
of Lamb's Works. Excepting 
the biography, the dates given 
are those of the first editions. 
The latter was published in 
the " English Men of Letters " 
Series, in 1878, but is slightly 
enlarged so as to be uniform. 



VI. SINGLE WORKS. 

[Arranged Alphabetically J\ 



1808. Adventures of Ulysses 
(The), by Charles 
Lamb. London, 
1808. i2mo. 
The First Edition. 

1 8 19. Adventures of Ulysses 
(The) [by C. L.]. A 
new edition. Lon- 
don, 1819. i2mo. 

1827. Adventures of Ulysses 
[by C. L.]. Designed 
as a supplement to 
the Adventures o f 
Telemachus. A new 
edition. Baldwin, 
Cradock & Joy, Lon- 
don, 1827. i2mo. 

1839. Adventures of Ulysses 
(The) [by C. L.]. 
[Engraving.] Lon- 
don, 1839. i2mo. 

1840. Another edition. 

To which are added 
Mrs. Leicester's 
School, etc. London, 
1S40. 8vo. 

1845. Another edition. 

London, 1845. i2mo. 



1843. 
1879. 



1886. 



1890. 



1830. 



Another edition. 

London, 1848. i2mo. 

Adventures of Ulysses 
[Half Hour Series]. 
N. Y., Harper & 
Bros., 1879. 32mo. 

Adventures of Ulysses, 
Edited with notes for 
schools. Boston, Ginn 
& Co., 1886. i6mo. 

Adventures of Ulysses. 

With an introduction 

by Andrew Lang. 

Map.] London, 

1890.] Square i2mo. 

Album Verses, with a 



few others, by Charles 
Lamb. [Engraved 
title.] London, 1830. 
l2mo. 

1798. Blank Verse, by Charles 
Lamb and Charles 
Lloyd. London, 
1798. i2mo. 

[1811.?] Beauty and the Beast; 
or, a Rough outside 
with a Gentle Heart. 
A poetical version of 
an ancient Tale. Illus- 
trated with a series of 



Bibliography. 



n3 



Elegant Engravings, 
and Beauty's Song at 
her Spinning-wheel, 
set to music by Mr. 
Whitaker. London, 
n.d. [1811 ?]. Square 
24mo. 

The First Edition. 



Another 


edition, 


1813. 


24mo. 




Beauty 


and the 


Beast ; 


or, a 


Rough 


outside 


with 


a Gentle 


Heart, 



I8I3. 

iS2=;. 



etc. London, William 
Jackson & Co., at the 
Juvenile Library, 195 
St. Clemens, Strand, 
1825. 3-s"- plain, 5^. 
colored. 

1886. Beauty and the Beast ; 

or, a Rough outside 
with a Gentle Heart. 
A Poem by Charles 
Lamb, now first re- 
printed from the ori- 
ginal edition of 1811, 
with Preface and 
Notes by Richard 
Heme Shepherd, 
London, 1886. i2mo. 

1887. Beauty and the Beast, 

by Charles Lamb, 
with an Introduction 
by Andrew Lang. 
Illustrated. London, 
n.d. [1887 ?]. Square 
i2mo. [Published with 
plates in two states.] 

1823. Elia. Essays which 
have appeared under 
that signature in the 
London Alagazine. 
London, 1823. i2mo. 
The First Edition. 

1828. Elia. Essays which have 



1828. 



1833. 

1835. 
1838. 
1840. 
1833. 



appeared under that 
signature in the Lo7i- 
don Magazine. Phila- 
delphia, Carey, Lea, 
and Carey, 1828. 
i8mo. 

The First American 
Edition. An exact re- 
print of the English. 

Elia. Essays which 
have appeared under 
that signature in the 
London Magazine. 
Second Series. Phila- 
delphia, Carey, Lea, 
and Carey, 1828. 
i8mo. 

A curious fact concern- 
ing this is that the sec- 
ond series was reprinted 
five years before the Eng- 
lish Edition appeared. 
It was done by some 
one who did not know 
Lamb's style thorough- 
ly, as several of his best 
Essays were not in- 
cluded, and others, not 
his, were, viz.: ''Nuns 
and Ale of Caverswell," 
by Allan Cunningham, 
and " Valentine's Day," 
" Twelfth Night : or 
What you Will," by B. 
W. Procter. 

Elia. Essays which 
have appeared under 
that signature, etc. 
A New^ Edition. Lon- 
don, 1833. Post 8vo. 

Elia, etc. London, 

1835. Post 8vo. 

Elia, etc. London, 

1838. Post 8vo. 

Elia, etc, London, 
1S40, i2mo. 

[Elia.] Last Essays of 
Elia (The). Being a 
sequel to Essays pub- 



174 



Bibliography. 



1835. 
1836. 
1840. 

1843. 

1845. 

1847. 
1849. 
1852. 
1853. 



lished under that 
name. [Second Se- 
ries.] London, 1833. 
Small 8vo. 

The First Edition, re- 
printed the same year in 
Philadelphia, lamo. 

— The Same. [Both 
Series.] A New Edi- 
tion. London, 1835. 
8vo. 2 vols. 

— The Same. [Both 
Series.] A New Edi- 
tion. London, 1836. 
Svo. 

— The Same. [Both 
Series.] Complete in 
One Volume. Lon- 
don, 1840. i2mo. 

The series are paged 
separately. 

The Same. [Both 



Series.] A New Edi- 
tion. Portrait. Lon- 
don, 1843. 8vo. 

The edition was also 
issued in two volumes. 

Essays of Elia (The). 
[Library of Choice 
Reading.] New York, 
Wiley & Putnam, 
1845. 2 vols. i2mo. 

The Same. [Both 

Series.] London, 
1847. i2mo. 

The Same. [Both 

Series. ] London, 
1849. i2mo. 

The Same. [Both 

Series.] New York, 
1852. i2mo. 

The Same. In Two 

Volumes. A New 
Edition. [Portrait.] 
London, 1853. 2 vols. 
i6mo. 



1S65. 



1S67. 



1867. 
1867. 



1872. 

1878. 

1879. 



1879. 
1879. 



— The Same. New 
Edition. New York, 
Widdleton , 1865. 
Svo. 

— The Same. A New 
Edition, with a Dedi- 
cation and Preface 
hitherto unpublished, 
and a few Reminis- 
cences by E. Oliver. 
London, J. C. Hot- 
ten, 1867. Svo. 

— The Same. Lon- 



don, Moxon, 1867. 
i2mo. 
Essays of Elia, and Eli- 
ana (The), with a 
Biographical Essay by 
H. S. London, 1867. 
i2mo. 

Bohn's Standard Li- 
brary. 

Another edition. 

London, 1872. Svo. 

Essays of Elia. [Vest- 
Pocket Series.] Bos- 
ton, 1878. 32mo. 

Essays of Elia, and Eli- 
ana, with a memoir by 
Barry Cornwall [B. 
W. Procter]. Lon- 
don, George Bell & 
Sons, 1879. 2 vols. 
iSmo. 
[EHa.] Twenty Se- 
lected Essays by G. 
H. Greene. London, 
1879. 8vo. 

The Same. [Handy 

Volume Series.] N. 
Y., Appleton, 1879, 
i6mo. 

The Same, with In- 
troduction and Notes 
by Alfred Ainger. 



Bibliography. 



175 



1883. 



1884. 
1885. 
1885. 



1886. 



1887. 
1888. 



London, Macmillan & 
Co., 1883. i2mo. 

Reprinted 1884-1887, 
[with corrections and 
additions], 1888. 

Essays of Elia, by 
Charles Lamb. [Il- 
lustrated with etch- 
ings by R. Swain Gif- 
ford, James D. Smil- 
lie, Charles A. Piatt, 
F. S. Church.] [Is- 
lington Edition.] New 
York, 1883. 4to. 

This edition was lim- 
ited to 250 copies. 

The vSame, reissued 

on thinner paper. 
18S4. 

Another edition. 

[Illustrated.] Edin- 
burgh, 1885. 8vo. 

Essays of Elia and Other 
Pieces, with an Intro- 
duction by Henry 
Morley. [Morley's 
Universal Library.] 
London, 1885. i2mo. 

The notes are by 
Charles Kent. 

[Elia.] Some Essays 
of Elia [with illustra- 
tions by C. O. Mur- 
ray]. London, 1886. 
8vo. 

Essays of Elia, etc., 
with a preface by H. 
R. Haweis. London, 
1886. Square i6mo. 

The Same. Lon- 
don, 1887. 
The Same. 



1888. 

Essays of Elia (The), 
edited by Augustine 
Birrell [with etch- 



ings by Herbert Rail- 
ton. [The Temple 
Library]. London, J. 
M. Dent & Co., 1888. 
2 vols. 24mo. 

This edition was also 
made in Large Paper. 

1889. Essays of Elia (The) 
[Illustrated from Pho- 
tographs taken by 
Walter Collett.] Lon- 
don, David Stott, 
1889. 32mo. 

This was made also in 
Large Paper, only 100 
copies printed. 

1802. John Woodvil. A Tra- 
gedy ; to which are 
added Fragments of 
Burton, the author 
of the Anatomy of 
Melancholy. London, 
1802. i6mo. 

The First Edition, in- 
corporated in the Works 
thereafter. 

1807. Mrs. Leicester's School; 
or, the History of 
Several Young Ladies 
related by themselves. 
London, 1807. 
The First Edition. 

1809. Mrs. Leicester's School ; 

or, the History of 
Several Young Ladies 
related by themselves. 
The Second Edition. 
I.,ondon, 1809. i6mo. 
The Second Edition. 

1810. Mrs. Leicester's School ; 

or, the History of 
Several Young Ladies 
related by themselves. 
Third Edition. [Fron- 



176 



Bibliography. 



1814. 

1825. 



1827. 

1836. 

1844. 

1855. 
1881. 

1884. 

1885. 



tispiece.] London, 
1810. i6mo. 

The Third Edition. 

The Same. Lon- 
don, 1814. 

The Fourth Edition. 

Mrs. Leicester's School ; 
or, the History of 
Several Young Ladies 
related by themselves. 
Ninth Edition. [Fron- 
tispiece by Harvey.] 
London, 1825. l2mo. 

Mrs. Leicester's School ; 
or, the History of 
Several Young Ladies 
related by themselves. 
Tenth Edition. Lon- 
don, 1827. 

Another edition. 

London, 1836. Post 



8vo. 
— Another 



1809. 



edition. 
London, 1844. i2mo. 

Another edition. 

London, 1855. 

Another edition, 

with illustrations. 
London, 1881. 8vo. 

Mrs. Leicester's School, 
etc. New Edition. 
London, 1884. i2mo. 

Mrs. Leicester's School 
and other writings 
in Prose and Verse, 
by Charles Lamb, 
with Introduction and 
Notes by Alfred Ain- 
ger. London, 1885. 
i2mo. 

Poetry for Children. 
Entirely original, by 
the author of " Mrs. 
Leicester's School." 
In two volumes. Lon- 



I»I2. 



1872. 



1877. 



1877. 



1889. 



don, 1S09. 2 vols, 
i2mo. 
The First Edition. 
Poetry for Children. 
Entirely original, by 
the author of " Mrs. 
Leicester's School." 
Boston, West and 
Richardson, and Ed- 
ward Cotton, 1812. 

The first copy known, 
and the first American 
reprint. 

Poetry for Children, by 
Charles and Mary 
Lamb. Edited and 
prefaced by Richard 
Heme Shepherd. 
London, 1872. i6mo. 

Poetry for Children, by 
Charles and Mary 
Lamb. To which are 
added " Prince Do- 
rus," and some un- 
collected Poems by 
Charles Lamb. Ed- 
ited, Prefaced, and 
Annotated by Rich- 
ard Heme Shepherd. 
London, Chatto & 
Windus, 1877. i2mo. 

The Same. Re- 



printed. New York, 
1877, Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons. i6mo. 
Poetry for Children, by 
Charles and Mary 
Lamb. To which are 
added " Prince Do- 
rus," and some un- 
collected Poems by 
Charles Lamb. Ed- 
ited, Prefaced, and 
Annotated by Rich- 



Bibliography. 



177 



ard Heme Sliepherd. 
New York, 1S89. 
i6mo. 

An exact reprint of 
the edition of 1877. 

iSii. [?] Prince Dorus ; or, 
Flattery put out of 
Countenance. A Po- 
etical version of an 
Ancient Tale. Illus- 
trated with a series of 
Elegant Engravings. 
London, 1811. i2mo. 
The First Edition. 

1877. [Prince Dorus.] Poetry 
for Children, by 
Charles and Mary 
Lamb. To which are 
added "Prince Do- 
rus," and some un- 
collected Poems by 
Charles Lamb. Ed- 
ited, Prefaced, and 
Annotated by Rich- 
ard Heme Shepherd. 
London, Chatto & 
Windus, 1877. i2mo. 

1889. Prince Dorus, by Charles 
Lamb. With Nine 
Illustrations in fac- 
simile (hand-colour- 
ed). London, Field & 
Tuer, 1889. 8vo. 

Only 500 copies 
printed, each numbered. 
This contains an In- 
troduction by A. W. T. 
[A. W. TuerJ. and is an 
exact fac-simile of the 
original edition. 

1835. Recollections of Christ's 
Hospital, by the late 
Charles Lamb, origi- 
nally published in 
1 8 13, now reprinted 
by some of his school- , 



fellows and friends, 
etc. London, 1835. 
8vo. 
1 83 1. Satan in Search of a 
Wife ; with the whole 
process of his Court- 
ship and ^Marriage, 
and who danced at the 
wedding, by an Eye- 
witness. London, 
1831. i2mo. 

The First Edition. 
1808. Specimens of English 
Dramatic Poets, who 
lived about the time 
of Shakespeare, with 
Notes, by Charles 
Lamb. London, 1808. 
i2mo. 

The First Edition. 

1813. Specimens of English 

Dramatic Poets, who 
lived about the time 
of Shakespeare, with 
Notes. Second Edi- 
tion. London, John 
Bumpus, 1S13. 
The Second Edition. 

1814. Specimens of English 

Dramatic Poets, who 
lived about the time 
of Shakespeare, with. 
Notes. London, 1814, 
Moxon. 2 vols. i2mo. 

1835. Specimens of English 
Dramatic Poets, who 
lived about the time 
of Shakespeare, with 
Notes. A new edition. 
In two volumes. 
London, 1835. i6mo. 

1844. Specimens of English 
Dramatic Poets, of 
about the time of 



178 



Bibliography. 



1845. 
1847. 



Shakespeare, etc. 
London, 1844, 2 vols. 

Another edition. 



1852. 

1854. 

1854. 
1798. 
1835. 

1838. 
1841. 



New York, 1845. 
vols, in I. 
Specimens of English 
Dramatic Poets, who 
lived about the time 
of Shakespeare, with 
Notes, by Charles 
Lamb. A new edition, 
including the extracts 
from the G a r r i c k 
Plays. [Bohn's Anti- 
quarian Library.] 
London, 1847. i2mo. 

This edition contains a 
short Prefatory note by 
H. G. Bohn. 

The same, London, 

1852. Crown 8vo. 
Specimens of English 

Dramatic Poets, etc. 

London, 1854. Crown 

8vo. 
Specimens of English 

Dramatic Poets, etc. 

N. Y., W. P. Hazard, 

1854. i2mo. 

Tale of Rosamund Gray 
and Old Blind Mar- 
garet (A). London, 
1798. r2mo. 

Tale of Rosamund Gray, 
Recollections of 
Christ's Hospital (A), 
etc., etc. London, 
1835. 8vo. 

Tale of Rosamund Gray 
and Old Blind Mar- 
garet (A), etc. Lon- 
don, 1838. 8vo. 

Tale of Rosamund Gray 
and Old Blind Mar- 



garet (A). London, 
1841. i2mo. 

Essays, Letters, etc. 
[Double column.] 

1849. Tale of Rosamund Gray, 

etc. London, 1849. 
l2mo. 

1850. Tale of Rosamund Gray, 

etc. (Bohn.) London, 
1850. i2mo. 

1807. Tales from Shakespear, 
designed for the Use 
of Young Persons, by 
Charles Lamb. Em- 
bellished with Copper- 
Plates. In two vol- 
umes. London, 1807. 
2 vols. i2mo. 
The First Edition. 

1809. Tales from Shakespear, 
designed for the Use 
of Young Persons. 
[20 plates, engraved 
by Blake.] [Portrait 
of Shakespeare.] Lon- 
don, i8og. 2 vols. 
i2mo. 
The Second Edition. 



1810, Another edition. 

London. i2mo. 2 
vols. 

18 13. Tales from Shakespear, 
designed for the Use 
of Young Persons. 
Philadelphia, Brad- 
ford and Inskeep, 
1813. 2 vols. i2mo. 

The First American 
Edition. 

1 8 16. Tales from Shakespear, 
designed for the Use 
of Young Persons. 
The Third Edition. 
[20 plates, engraved 



Bibliography. 



179 



by Blake]. London 
i8r6. 2 vols. i2mo. 

This edition contains 
the " Advertisement " to 
the second, but is in other 
respects a reprint. 

1822. Tales from Shakespear, 
designed for the Use 
of Young Persons. 
The Fourth Edition. 
London, 1S22. 2 
vols. i2mo. 

The Fourth Edition, 
omitting the " Adver- 
tisement." 

1831. Tales from Shakespeare, 
designed for the Use 
of Young Persons 
[with designs by Har- 
vey]. London, Mox- 
on, I S3 1. i2mo. 

The Fifth Edition, the 
printers being changed 
from M. J. Godwin to 
Moxon. 

T837. Another edition. 

London, 1837. i2mo. 

1838. Tales from Shakespeare, 

designed for the Use 
of Young Persons, by 
Mr. and Miss Lamb. 
Sixth Edition, orna- 
mented with designs 
by Harvey. London, 
Baldwin and Cradock, 
1838. 

The Sixth Edition. 

1839. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, Baldwin 
[Godwin], 1839. 
i2mo. 

1843. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, H. G. Bohn, 
1843. i2mo. 

1844. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, 1844, 

Groombridge. 32mo. 

— — The Same. Lon- 



don, 1844, Cox. 2 
vols. 1 8 mo. 
— The Same. Lon- 



don, Moxon, 1844. 
24m o. 

1846. Tales from Shakespeare, 
with vocabulary, com- 
piled by E. Amthor. 
Leipsic, 1846. i6mo. 

1859. Tales from Shakespeare. 
Edited by Charles 
Knight. London, 
1859, Griffin. i8mo. 

Reprinted, London, 
1865. r2mo. 

1861. Tales from Shakespeare. 
London, 1861, Bell 
& Daldy. 24mo. 

1863. Tales from Shakespeare, 

with woodcuts, by 
Harvey. London, 
1863. i2mo. 

1864. Tales from Shakespeare. 

New York, F. H. 
Dodd, 1864. 32mo. 

1864. Tales from Shakespeare. 

New York, Hurd & 
Houghton, 1864. 
i2mo. 

1865. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, 1865. i2mo. 

1866. Another edition. 

London, 1866. 8vo. 

1867. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, Routledge, 
1867. 

1873. Another edition. 

London, 1873. 8vo. 

1875. Tales from Shakespeare . 

[Illustrated.] Lon- 
don, 1S75, i2mo. 

1876. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, Barrett, 
1876. Crown 8vo. 



i8o 



Bibliography. 



1877. Tales from Shakespeare. 

[Half -Hour Series.] 

N. Y., Harper Bros., 

1877. 32mo. 
1S77. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, Lockwood, 

1877. T2mo. 

1877. Tales from Shakespeare. 
[Little Classics.] Bos- 
ton, Osgood. i8mo. 

1877. Tales from Shakespeare. 

New edition. [Illus- 
trated by Gilbert.] 
London, 1877. i6mo. 

1878. Tales from Shakespeare. 

[Illustrated.] Lon- 
don, 1878, Chatto & 
Windus. 4to. 
1878. Tales from Shakespeare. 
London, Warne, 1S78. 

1878. Tales from Shakespeare. 

With twelve illustra- 
tions in permanent 
photography from the 
Boyd ell Gallery. Lon- 
don, Bickers & Son, 

1878. Crown 8vo. 

1879. Tales from Shakespeare. 

London, 1879. 2 vols. 
1 2 mo. 
1879. Tales from Shakespeare. 
London, Whittaker, 

1879. 32mo. 

1879. Tales from Shakespeare, 
by Charles and Mary 
Lamb. Edited, with 
an Introduction, by 
Alfred Ainger. Lon- 
don, Macmillan & 
Co. [Golden Treas- 
ury Series.] i6mo. 

Reprinted, 1883, 1886, 
in i2mo. 



Another edition, 
don, 1887. 



Lon- 



1879. Another edition. 

London, 1879, 4to. 
1881. Tales from Shakespeare. 

[Colored Plates.] 

London, Routledge, 

1881. i2mo. 

1881. Tales from Shakespeare. 

[Illustrated Chandos 
Classics.] London, 
Warne, 1881. i2mo. 

1882. Tales from Shakespeare. 

[Illustrated by Gil- 
bert.] London, 1S82, 
Routledge. 4to. 

1883. Tales from Shakespeare. 

Edited by Ainger. 
London, 1883. i2mo. 

1883. Another edition. 

Edited by Alfred 
Ainger. [Globe Read- 
ings.] London, 1883. 
i2mo. 

1885. Tales from Shakespeare, 

designed for the Use of 
Young Persons. i6th 
Edition. [With steel 
Portrait. Engravings 
by Harvey.] London, 
1885. Lockwood. 
i2mo. 

1886. Another edition. 

[Routledge's World 
Library.] 1886. i6mo. 

t888. Tales from Shakespeare, 
by Charles and Mary 
Lamb. [Chiswick Se- 
ries.] London, 18S8. 
i8mo. 

1888. Another edition. 

Edited by A. Gardi- 
ner. [H e y vv o o d ' s 
Literary Readers.] 
London, 1888. 8vo. 



Bibliography. 



i8i 



VII. LETTERS. 



1837. The Letters of Charles 
Lamb, with a Sketch of his 
Life, by Thomas Noon Tal- 
fourd, one of his executors. 
In two volumes. [Portraits.] 
London, Edward Moxon, 1837. 
2 vols. 8vo. 

The Letters in this edition are 
not published entire. A mis- 
taken scrupulousness prompted 
the omission of much. 

1848. The Final Memorials 
of Charles Lamb : consisting 
chiefly of his Letters not be- 
fore published, with Sketches 
by some of his contemporaries, 
by Thomas Noon Talfourd, 
one of his executors. In two 
volumes. London, Edward 
Moxon, 1S48. 

Not published until after Mary's 
death. The first full-leng-th 
portrait of Lamb the public 
had obtained. 



1849. 



Another edition. 



London, Moxon. 1849. r2mo. 

Another Edition. Ap- 

pleton, New York. 1849. 
i2mo. 

1850. Another edition. 

London, 1850. i2mo. 

1854. The Same. Life 

and Letters, etc., etc. Phila- 



delphia, W. P. Hazard, 1854. 
llmo. 

1886. Letters of Charles 
Lamb, with some account of 
the writer, his friends and cor- 
respondents, and explanatory 
notes, by the late Sir Thomas 
Noon Talfourd, one of his ex- 
ecutors. An entirely new edi- 
tion. Carefully revised and 
greatly enlarged by W. Carew 
Hazlitt. London, George Bell 
& Sons, 1886. 2 vols. i2mo. 

Printed in Bohn Library. This 
edition contains Talfourd's 
orig-inal prefaces, and gives the 
Letters in full but rearranged, 
with additions, freely inter- 
spersed with original matter. 
They are also arranged chrono- 
logically. 

1888. The Letters of Charles 
Lamb, newly arranged, with 
additions, edited, with Intro- 
ductions and Notes, by Alfred 
Ainger. [Portrait.] London, 
Macmillan & Co., 1S88. 2 vols. 
i2mo. 

The recension of the Manning 
and Barton correspondence, a 
set of letters to Dibdin, a letter 
to Chambers and Dodwell, and 
a complete chronological ar- 
rangement of the Letters are 
the chief features of this, by all 
means, best edition. 



1 82 



Bibliography. 



VIII. POETICAL WORKS. 



1836. The Poetical Works of 
Charles Lamb. A new edition. 
London, Edward Moxon, 1836. 
8vo. 

The first edition in separate form. 
Those in italics are by Mary. 
Contents : Poems, Sonnets, 
Blank Verse, Album Verses. 

1838. The Poetical Works of 
Charles Lamb. Third Edition. 
London, Moxon, 1838. i6mo. 

An exact reprint of the edition of 

1836. 

1839. The Same. Lon- 
don, 1839. Medium Svo. 



1840. The Same. Lon- 
don, 1840. i2mo. 

1842. The Same. Lon- 
don, Bohn, 1842. i2mo. 

1849. The Same. Lon- 
don, 1848. Svo. 

1852. The Same. Phila- 
delphia, 1852. 8vo. 

1884. Poems, Plays, and 
Miscellaneous Essays, with 
Notes and Introduction by 
Alfred Ainger. London, Mac- 
millan & Co., 1884. i2mo. 



IX. LAMBIANA. 



BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISMS, ETC. 



Ainger (Alfred). Charles Lamb 
[Enghsh Men of Let- 
ters Series]. London, 
1882. i6mo. 

Ainger (Alfred). Charles Lamb. 
London, 1888. i2mo. 

Rewritten and enlarged 
from the former work. 

Allibone (S. A.). Critical Dic- 
tionary of English 
Literature and British 
and American authors. 
Philadelphia, 1870. 
3 vols. 8vo. 

Vol. II. Article : Charles 
Lamb. 

Allsop (Thomas). Letters, 
Conversations; and 
Recollections of S. T. 



Coleridge. London, 

1836. 2 vols. i2mo. 

This contains many 
items of interest con- 
cerning Lamb. 

American Cyclopedia (Apple- 
ton's). New York, 
1873. 16 vols. Svo. 
Article : Charles Lamb. 
Babson (J. E.). Eliana : being 
the hitherto uncol- 
lected writings of 
Charles Lamb. New 
York and Boston, 
1865. i2mo. 
Contents : Preface, Es- 
says and Sketches, The 
Pawnbroker's Daugh- 
ter, The Adventures of 
Ulysses, Tales, Poems, 



Bibliography. 



183 



Letters, etc. This was a 
valuable addition to the 
knowledge of Lamb. 

Balmanno (Mary). Pen and 
Pencil. New York, 
1858. Square 8vo. 
Pp. 121-146. 

Barton (Bernard). Memoirs, 
Letters, and Poems 
of. Edited by his 
daughter. Philadel- 
phia, 1856. i2mo. 

Charles Lamb, pp. 168- 
184. 

Bates (William). The Maclise 
Portrait Gallery of 
" Illustrious Literary 
Characters," with 
Memoirs, etc. Lon- 
don, 1883. 8vo. 
Charles Lamb, pp. 2go- 
300. 

[Birrell (Augustine).] Obiter 
Dicta. [Second Se- 
ries.] London, 1887. 
i2mo. 

Charles Lamb, pp. 222- 
236. A review of 
"Works" reprinted 
from Macmillan's 

Magazine. 

Blessington (Countess of). The 
Literary Life and 
Correspondence of. 
Edited by R. R. Mad- 
den, London, 1855. 
3 vols. 8vo. 

Vol. II. p. 369 ; Vol. III. 
p. 176. 

Brie a Brae Series [edited by 
R. H. Stoddard]. 
Personal Recollec- 
tions of Lamb, Haz- 
litt, and others. New 
York, 1875. i2mo. 
Introductory Preface, p. 
1-47. 



Bulwer-Lytton (E. L.). Prose 
Works. London, 

1868. 3 vols. i2mo. 
Vol. I. pp. 89-123. 

Calvert (George H.). The 
Gentleman. Boston, 
1861. i2mo. 
Pp. 32-42. 

Carlyle (Thomas). A History 
of the First Forty 
Years of his Life, 
1795-1835. By J. 
A. Froude. London, 
1882. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Vol. I. p. 222 ; Vol. II. 
pp. 109, 210. 

Chambers's Cyclopedia of 
English Literature. 
London, 1876. 2 vols. 
8vo. 
Vol. II. pp. 90-95. 

Chambers's Encyclopedia, etc. 
Revised Edition. Ed- 
inburgh, 1882. 8vo. 
Article : Charles Lamb. 

Chorley (H. F.). The Authors 
of England. A series 
of Medallion Por- 
traits, etc. London, 
1838. 4to. 
Charles Lamb. 

Clarke (Charles and Mary 
Cowden"). Recollec- 
tions of Writers, with 
Letters. New York, 
1878. i2mo. 

Charles Lamb and his 
Letters — Mary Lamb, 
pp. 158-189. 

Clarke (F. L.). Golden Friend- 
ships, etc. London, 
1884. 8vo. 
Lamb and Coleridge, pp. 



1 84 



Bibliography. 



Clayden (P. W.). Rogers and 
his Contemporaries. 
London, 1886. 2 vols. 
Crown 8vo. 
Vol. I. p. 350. 

Coleridge (S. T.). Life of, by 
Hall Caine [Great 
Writers' Series.] Lon- 
don, 1887. 8vo. 
Numerous references to 
Charles Lamb. 

Collins (Stephen). Autobiog- 
raphy and Miscella- 
nies. Philadelphia, 
1872. i2mo. 
P-39- 

Cottle (Joseph). Reminiscences 
of Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge and Robert 
Southey. London, 
1847. i2mo. 
Frequent mention of 
Lamb. 

Craddock (Thomas). Charles 
Lamb. Liverpool. 

1867. i2mo. 

Craik (G. L.). Compendious 
History of English 
Literature, &c. New 
York, 1875. i2mo. 
Vol. IL pp. 478, 534, 553, 
554, 555- 

Cunningham (Allan). Bio- 
graphical and Critical 
History of the Liter- 
ature of the last Fifty 
Years. [Waldie's Li- 
brary, Vol. III.] Phil- 
adelphia, 1833-1849. 
12 vols. i6mo. 

Daniel (George). Love's Last 
Labor not Lost. Lon- 
don, 1863. i6mo. 
Re collections of 
Charles Lamb, pp. 
1-31- 



De Quincey (Thomas). Bio- 
graph ic a 1 Essays. 
1851. i2mo. 
Pp. 167-228. 

Literary Reminiscences. 

Boston, 1852. 2 vols. 

i2mo. 

Vol. I. pp. 62-135. 

Elliston (R. W.). The Life 
and Enterprise of. 
By George Raymond. 
London, 1857. i2mo. 
Pp. 266, etc. 

Encyclopedia Britannica. The 
Encyclopedia Britan- 
nica. Eighth Edi- 
t i o n . Edinburgh, 
1856. 4to. 

Article: Lamb, by R. 
Carruthers. 

The Same. Ninth Edi- 

t i o n . Edinburgh, 

1876. 4to. 

Article : Charles Lamb. 

English Cyclopedia. A new 
Dictionary of Uni- 
versal Knowledge. 
(Charles Knight's.) 
Article: Charles Lamb. 

English Poets (The). Selec- 
tions, with Critical 
Introductions, etc. 
[Edited by T. H. 
Ward.] London, 
i88g. 4 vols. i2mo. 

Charles Lamb, Vol. IV. 
pp. 326-333. 

Fields (James T.). Yester- 
days with Authors. 
Boston, 1871. i2mo. 

The Article: "Barry 
Cornwall and some of 
his Friends," contains 
numerous references 
to Lamb and his sister. 



Bibliography. 



185 



Fitzgerald (Percy). Afternoon 
Lectures. Second Se- 
ries. London, 1864. 
i2mo. 
Vol. II. pp. 67-101, 

Art of the Stage (The), 

as set out in Lamb's 
Dramatic Essays, with 
a Commentary. Lon- 
don, 1885. i2mo. 

— ■ Charles Lamb : His 
Friends, his Haunts, 
and his Books. [Por- 
traits.] London, 1866. 
Square i2mo. 

>^ Little Essays, Sketches, 

and Characters, by 
C. L. Selected from 
his Letters. London, 
1884. i2mo. 

Recreations of a Lon- 

don Literary Man. 

London, 1882. 2 vols. 

i2rao. 

Vol. I. p. 235. 

Fox (Caroline). Memoirs of 
Old Friends, etc., 
1835-1871- Edited by 
H. N. Pym. Lon- 
don, 1882. 8vo. 
Mentions Lamb, pp. 12, 
19, 46, 52, 145. 

Francis (John). Literary 
Chronicle of a Half 
Century. London, 
18S2. 2 vols. i2mo. 
Frequent mention of 
Lamb and his connec- 
tion with The Athe- 
ncEuin. 

Gilchrist (Mrs.). Mary Lamb. 
[Famous Women Se- 
ries.] i6mo. Lon- 
don, W. H. Allen, 
1883. i6mo. 
Numerous mention of 
her brother. 



Gilfillan (George). A Gallery 
of Literary Portraits. 
London, 1845-54. 3 
vols. i2mo. 

Vol. I. pp. 338-345- 
Sketch of Lamb, with 
Portrait. 

Godwin (William). His 
Friends and Ac- 
quaintances. By C. 
Kegan Paul. IjOu- 
don, 1876. 2 vols. 
8vo. 

Vol. I., p. 362; Vol. II., 
p. 321. 

Hall (S. C). Retrospect of 
a Long Life. From 
1S15 to 1S83. Lon- 
don, 1883. 2 vols. 
8vo. 

Vol. II. contains Anec- 
dotes, etc., of Lamb. 

Hall (Mr. and Mrs. S. C). 
Memories of Great 
Men and Women. 
London, 1876. 8vo. 
P. II. 

Haydon (B. R.). Life of. 
Edited by Tom Tay- 
lor. London, 1853. 
3 vols. i2mo. 

Numerous references to 
Lamb. 

Hazlitt (W. Carew). Mary 
and Charles Lamb. 
Poems, Letters, and 
Remains. Now first 
collected. With Rem- 
iniscences and Notes. 
Portraits, Fac-similes, 
and Illustrations. 
London, 1874. 4to. 

Unusually interesting 
and important, con- 
taining matter not in 



1 86 



Bibliography. 



any of the earlier edi- 
tions. Issued also in 
8vo. 

Spirit of the Age ; or, 

Contemporary Por- 
traits. London, 1825. 
l2mo. 
Pp- 395-405- 

Table Talk. London, 

1845-6. 2 vols, 
i6mo. 

Vol. II. On Conversation 
of Authors. 

Memoirs. With Por- 

tions of his Corre- 
spondence. By W. C. 
H a z 1 i 1 1. London, 
1867. 2 vols. i2mo. 
References to Lamb. 

Literary Remains. By 

his Son. London, 
1836. 2 vols. i2mo. 
References to C. L. 

Hood (Thomas). Memorials,by 
his Daughter. Lon- 
don, i860. 2 vols. 
i2mo. 

Howitt (William). The North- 
ern Heights of Lon- 
don. London, 1869. 
8vo. 
Pp. 882-885. 

Hunt (Leigh). Lord Byron 
and Some of his 
Contemporaries, etc. 
London, 1828. 4to. 

Charles Lamb, pp. 296, 
299. [With Portrait by 
Meyer.] 

Autobiography. With 

Reminiscences o f 
Friends and Contem- 
poraries. London, 
1850. 3 vols. i2mo. 

Numerous references to 
Lamb. 



Hutton (Laurence). Literary 
Landmarks of Lon- 
don. Boston, 1885. 
i2mo. 

Pp. 182-193. The most 
accurate account ex- 
tant. 

Imperial Dictionary of Univer- 
sal Biography (The). 
Glasgow, n.d. 8vo. 
Vol. III. Article: 
Charles Lamb, by 
Charles Taylor. 

Imitation of Celebrated Au- 
thors ; or. Imaginary 
Rejected Articles. 
London, 1844. i2mo. 
P. 30 contains imitation 
of Lamb. 

Ireland (Alexander). List of 
the writings of Wil- 
liam Hazlitt and 
Leigh Hunt, etc., pre- 
ceded by a review of, 
and extracts from Bar- 
ry Cornwall's "Me- 
morials of Charles 
Lamb," etc., and a 
chronological list of 
the works of Charles 
Lamb. London : 

1868. i2mo. 
Pp. 3-26. Charles Lamb. 

Jesse (J. Heneage). London, 
its celebrities, charac- 
ters, and remarkable 
places. London, 1851. 
3 vols. i2mo. 
Vol. 1. pp. 330, 345, 388 ; 

Vol. III. pp. 220, 228, 

313- 

Johnson's Universal Cyclo- 
paedia, etc. New 
York, 1886. 2 vols. 
8vo. 

Article. Charles Lamb. 
P. C. Bliss. 



Bibliography. 



.87 



Mathews (William). The Great 
Conversers and other 
Essays. Chicago, 
1S76. T2mo. 
Pp. 32, 117, 165, 173. 

Macmillan (Daniel). Memoirs 
of. By Thomas 

Hughes. London, 
1822. i2mo. 
P. 141. 

Mathews (Charles). Life and 
Correspondence, etc. 
Edited by his Widow. 
London, 1838. 4 vols. 
8vo. 

Numerous references to 
Lamb. 

Minto (William), A Manual of 
English Prose Liter- 
ature, etc. London, 
1886. i2mo. 

Pp- 537. 539- 

Moir(D. M.), Sketches of the 
Poetical Literature of 
the past Half Cent- 
ury. Edinburgh, 
1S51. i6mo. 

Moore (Thomas). Journal and 
Correspondence. Ed- 
ited by Lord John 
Russell. London, 

1853. 8 vols. 8vo. 

Lamb Anecdotes, etc., 
Vol. in. p. 136: Vol. 
IV. pp. so, 51 : Vol. V. 
p. 317 ; Vol. VI. p. 249. 

Munden (J. S.). Memoirs of. 
By his Son. London, 
1S44. 8vo. 

Refers to Charles Lamb. 

Mylius (W. F.). The First 
Book of Poetry for 
the Use of Schools, 



etc. London, 1S15. 
i6mo. 

This contains selections 
from " Poetry for 
Children." 

Notes and Queries. General 
Index to Notes and 
Queries. Seven Series. 
London, 1856, 1890. 
4to. 

Numerous references to 
Lamb. 

Oliphant (Mrs.). Literary 

History of England. 

London, 1889. 3 
vols. 8vo. 

Vol. I. pp. 230, 250 ; Vol. 
II. pp. 65, 176, 177, 250, 
etc. ; Vol. III. I, 7, 240. 

Pater (W.H.). Appreciations, 

with an Essay on 

Style. London, i88g. 

i2mo. 

Pp. 107-126, Charles 
Lamb. 

Patmore (P. G ). My Friends 
and Acquaintances. 
London, 1884. 4 vols. 
i2mo. 

Numerous and most im- 
portant references to, 
and reminiscences of 
Lamb. 

[Patmore (P. G.).] Pvcjected 
Articles. London, 
1826. i2mo. 

Contains imitation of 
Lamb. 

Pen and Ink Sketches of Poets, 
Preachers, and Politi- 
cians. [By John Dix.] 
London, 1846. 8vo. 

Lamb and Coleridge, pp. 
122, 140. 

Penny Cyclopaedia (The). 



1 88 



Bibliography. 



[Chas. Knight's.] 
London, 1839. 8vo. 

Vol. XIII. Article : 
Charles Lamb. 

Personal Traits of British Au- 
thors — Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Lamb, 

Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, 
Procter. Edited by 
E. T. Mason. New 
York, 1885. i2mo. 

Pp. 113-173. Charles 
Lamb. 

Poole (Thomas). Thomas Poole 
and his Friend. By 
Mrs. Sandford. Lon- 
don, 1888. i2mo. 
2 vols. 8vo. 

Numerous references to 
Charles Lamb. 

Procter (B.W.). Charles Lamb. 

A Memoir, by Barry 

Cornwall. London, 

1868. 8vo. 

This contains portraits 
theretofore unknown. 

Robinson (Henry Crabb). 
Diary, Reminiscences, 
and Correspondence, 
selected and edited by 
Thomas Sadler. Lon- 
don, 1866. 3 vols. 
8vo. 

This is crowded with 
references to Lamb 
and his sister. 

Russell (W. Clark). The Book 
of Authors. London, 
1876. 8vo. 

Pp. 71, 105, 144, 204, 392, 
399, 427, 447. 

St. Albans (Duchess of). Me- 
moirs of Miss Mellon, 
by Mrs. C. Barron- 



Wilson. London, 

1840. 2 vols. i2mo. 

Account of the produc- 
tion of " Mr. H."— a 
Farce. Vol I. p. 296. 

Shaw (Thomas B.). Complete 
Manual of English 
Literature, etc. New 
York, 1867. i2mo. 
Pp. 470-472- 

Sou they (Robert). Life and 
Correspondence. Ed- 
ited byC. C. Southey. 
London, 1850. 6 vols. 
8vo. 

Many references to 
Lamb. 

Swinburne (A. C). ** William 
Blake," a critical Es- 
say. London, 1868. 
8vo. 
P. 8. 

Miscellanies. London, 

1886. i2mo. 
Charles Lamb and 
George Wither, pp. 
152-200. Originally 
published in the Nine- 
teenth Century. 

Taine, H. A. History of Eng- 
lish Literature. Trans- 
lated by H. Van Laun. 
London, 1886. 4 vols. 
8vo. 

Charles Lamb, Vol. III. 
pp. 423-427. 

Thompson (Mrs. K. B.). Cele- 
brated Friendships. 
London, 1881. 2 vols. 
i2mo. 
Vol. II. pp. 53-98. 

Ticknor (George). Life, Let- 
ters, and Journals of. 
[Edited by G. S. Hil- 
liard, George Still- 
man , and others] 



Bibliography. 



189 



Boston, 1876. 2 vols. 

8vo. 

Vol. I. p. 294, contains a 
curious account of an 
evening with Lamb. 

Timbs (J.). Anecdote Lives 
of the Later Wits and 
Humourists. L o n - 
don, 1874. 2 vols. 
i2mo. 

Vol. I. contains numer- 
ous allusions, etc., to 
Lamb. 

Trollope (Wm.). A History 
of the Royal Founda- 
tion of Christ's Hos- 
pital, with an account 
of the plan of educa- 
tion, etc. , and Me- 
moirs of Eminent 
Blues, etc. London, 
1834. 4to. 

Numerous references to 
Lamb. 

Tuckerman (H. T.). Charac- 
teristics of Literature. 
First Series. Phila- 
delphia, 1849. i2mo. 

Pp. 130, 170. Charles 
Lamb, the Humourist. 

Universal Pronouncing- Diction- 



ary of Biography and 

Mythology. [Edited 

by Joseph Thomas.] 

Philadelphia, 1889. 

4to. 

Article : Charles Lamb. 

Wainewright (Thomas Grif- 
fiths). Essays and 
Criticisms. Now first 
collected, with some 
account of the author, 
by W. C. Hazlitt. 
London, iSSo. i2mo. 

Numerous references to 
Lamb. 

Wilson (John). Noctes Am" 
brosian^e. New York, 
1863. 5 vols. 8vo. 

Vol, L pp. 170, 224 ; Vol. 
II. p. 106. 

Willis (N. p.). Pencillings by 

the Way. New York. 

1853. i2mo. 
Wordsworth (William). Life, 

by William Knight. 

Edinburgh, 1889. 3 

vols. 8vo. 



Full of references 
Charles Lamb. 



to 



MAGAZINE ARTICLES. 



Lamb (Charles). Overland 
Monthly (N. S.), Vol. IV. p. 
2 84, H. Colbach. — The 
Academy, Vol. XXI. p. 168, 
R. C. Browne.— r/z^ Athe- 
ncEum, Vol. II. p. 566 (1886), 
A. Ainger. — Eclectic Maga- 
zine, Vol. XXIII. p. 491 ; 
Vol. XXXI. p. 399. — Fraser's 
^ Magazine, Vol. LXXV. p. 



657, G. Massey. — Living Age 
(Littell's), Vol. L. p. 145 ; 
Vol. LXI. p. -]-}!..— Monthly 
Review, Vol. XC. p. 253 ; 
Vol. CXXXVIIL p. no; 
Vol. CXLIII. p. 467.— 
Modern Review, Vol. C. pp. 
1-202. — Methodist Quarterly 
Review, Vol. XVIII. p. 566, 
W. H.Barnes. — AIac7?ii Han's 



190 



Bibliography. 



Magazine, Vol. XXIX. p. 
431, A. Black. — New Eng- 
land Magazine, Vol. IX. p. 
233. — People^ s Journal, Vol. 
XI. p. 357. — Pioneer {The), 
Vol. II. p. 144, C. H. Wash- 
burn. — Southern Literary 
Messenger, Vol. VI. p. 652. 
— Sharpens London Maga- 
zine, Vol. XXVIII. p. 239. 
— All the Year Round, Vol. 
XXXV, p. 275. — Canada 
Monthly, Yo\. XVII. p. 350, 
J. C. Dmxcdcn.— Dial {The) 
[Chicago], Vol. IX. p. 38, 
E. G. Johnson. — Every Sat- 
urday, Vol. XII. p. 292. — 
Ge7ttleman s Magazine (N. 
S.), Vol. XLI. p. 55, W. 
Summers. — Hogg's Weekly 
Lnstructor, Vol. XI. p. 145. 
Taifs Edinburgh Magazine 
(N. S.), Vol. IV. p. 575; 
Vol. V. pp. 237-5 59> De 
Quincey ; Vol. XV. p. 782. — 
Universalist Quarterly , Vol. 
II. p. 289, M. Davis ; Vol. 
XI. p. 90, J. Washburne ; 
Vol. XVII. p. 113, A. L. 
Barry. — Liarpei'^s Magazine, 
Vol. XXI. p. 811; Vol. LIV. 
p. 916 ; Vol. LV. p. 464 
[Easy Chair]. 

— A Memoir. By Barry 
Cornwall. British Quarter- 
ly Review, Vol. XLV. p. 
335. — Living Age [Littell's], 
Vol. XC. p. 771. — Edin- 
burgh Review, Vol. CXXIV. 
p. 261. 

— About Essayists and Re- 
viewers. — Charles Lamb. 
Bentley's Magazine, Vol. 
XXIX. p. 430. 

— About. Eclectic Maga- 



zitte, Vol. LXXVIII. p. 
675. — Temple Bar, Vol. 
LXXXV. p. 33. 

An Autobiographical 



Sketch. New Monthly Mag- 
azine [Colburn's], Vol. 
XLIII. p. 499. 
— Ainger's Life of. The 
Academy, Vol. XXI. p. 168, 
R. C. Browne. — The Athe- 
ncBum, Vol. I. p. 371 [1882]. 
and Dr. Johnson. Ton- 



pie Bar, Vol. LXXXVL p. 
237, P. W. Roose. 
and George "Wither. 



N'ineteenth Century, Vol. 
XVII. p. 66, A. C. Swin- 
burne. 

— and Hood. Christian 
Examiner, Vol. LXIX. p. 
415, T. B. Fox. 

— and his Friends. Fras- 



ej'' s Magazine, Vol. CV. p. 
606, J. Dennis. — North 
Amei'ican Review, Vol. CIV. 
p. 3863 

— and his Sister. Eclectic 
Magazine, Vol. XV. p. 257. 

— and Joseph Cottle. The 
Athenceum, Vol. II. p. 468 
[1886], A. Ainger. — The 
Same, Vol. II. p. 535 [1886], 
R. H. Shepherd. — The 
Same, Vol. II. p. 566 [1886], 
A. Ainger. 

— and Keats. Southern Lit- 



erary Messenger, Vol. XIV. 
p. 711, H. T. Tucker- 
man. 

— and Mary. Tinsley's 
Magazine, Vol. XXXVIII. 
p. 496. — The Dial [Chi- 
cago], Vol. IV. p. no, F. 
F. Browne. 

— and Mary Lamb, their 



Bibliography. 



191 



Editors and Biographers. 
IVestminster Review, Vol. 
CII. p. 419. 

— and Sydney Smith. At- 
lantic Monthly, Vol. III. p. 
290, W. L. Symonds. 

— and Thomas Carlyle. 
JSfew England Magazine^ 
Vol. XLIV. p. 605, N. W. 
Wells. 

— Another Dish of Lamb. 
Old and New Magazine, Vol. 
X. p. 613, J. E. Babson. 

— - at Edmonton. Dublin 
University Magazine (^. S.), 
Vol. VII. p. 469. — The 
Same, Vol. XCII. p. 467, 
H. F. Cox. 

— at his Desk. Gentleman s 
Magazine (N. S.), Vol. VI. 
p. 285. C. Pebody. 

— Books of. Historical 
Magazine, Vol. IX. p. 45. 

— Boyhood of. Dublin 
University Magazine, Vol. 
LXXIX. p. 149 

— Character of the Humour- 
ist — Charles Lamb. Fort- 
nightly, Vol. XXX. p. 466, 
W. H. Pater. 

— Concerning. Scribners 
Monthly, Vol. 11, p. 720, 
J. H. Twitchell. 

— Discovery of Lamb's 
' Poetry for Children." 

Gentleman^ s Magazine (N. 
S.), Vol. XIX. p. 113, R. 
H. Shepherd. 

— Dramatic Attempts of. 
Lippincotf s Magazine, Vol. 
XXI. p. 493, J. Brander 
Matthews. 

— Essays of Elia. Ameri- 
can Quarterly Review, Vol. 
XIX. p. 185, H. T. Tuck- 



erman. — Museum of Foreign 
Literature [Littell's], Vol. 
IV. p. 33. — Quarterly Re- 
view, Vol. LIV. p. 58, "E. 
B. " [Bulvver.] — Methodist 
Review, Vol. XLVII. p. 
382. D. Wise. 

— Eliana [with a Portrait]. 
London Society, Vol. XLII. 
p. 182. 

Fairy Tales in Verse, by. 



Gentleman s Magazine (N. 
S.). Vol. XXXV. p. 188. 
Final Memorials [edited 



byTalfourdj. British Quar- 
terly Review, Vol. VIII. p. 
381. — Christian Remenibrati- 
cer, Vol. XVI. p. 424. — New 
Monthly Magazine (Col- 
burn's), Vol. LXXXIII. p. 
532. — North British Review, 
Vol. X. p. 179. 
— Genius and Character of. 
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